Enterprise Open Source... And The Rest: Managing mixed source solutions in large scale organisations

This paper is intended to build on the author's 2004 presentation
'Managing an Open Source Development Environment', and incorporate
the further challenges of integrating the open source development
with more proprietary mixed source solutions. Managers, architects
and tech leads will have a better sense of how to engineer applications
for the mixed source enterprise.

Most organisations now have some level of open source adoption.
Increasingly, managers are challenged with the responsibility of
managing a hybrid environment of open source, closed source and
proprietary source solutions.

Supplier relationships offer differing levels of flexibility,
support, integration options and training/documentation. How should
such systems be architected? Where should the core of development
occur? What is the appropriate balance between investing in existing
technologies and preparing for the "next version" providing
significantly upgraded functionality but new APIs, tools and even
languages/platforms.

Issues from 2004 will be briefly reviewed, the author will discuss
his experience in working with a mixed source enterprise environment,
make some recommendations about best practise and finally encourage
discussion with attendees to learn from each others' experience.