The Open Source Business Foundation (OSBF, www.osbf.de) founded in Nuremberg in May 2006 is a European-wide open source network. The members of OSBF are companies, institutions and persons inspired by open source software. The activities of the network always focus on the business benefits of open source software. The Articles of Association of OSBF accordingly define the purpose of the association as strengthening the open source software and service industry and creating and safeguarding jobs in the development and service sectors.
OSBF also has political tasks and goals. The importance of open source software is to be improved by actively coordinating opinion-making among OSBF members and by lobbying third parties such as associations and politics. Typical fields of activity are improving the political framework for the use of open source software, legal aspects of patents and licenses, local authority contract awarding guidelines or promoting the use of open source software in small and medium enterprises. OSBF is to intensify dialog with ministries and political parties in Berlin and Brussels for this purpose.

The members of OSBF

OSBF had 160 members from Germany, Europe and the USA at the beginning of 2009, so that both start-up and established companies find a broad platform that offers new contacts and supports and promotes business ideas.
About half the OSBF members are software and service companies, including international companies like Novell, Open-Xchange and Red Hat. Almost a dozen members are venture capital companies, which support companies needing to finance growth. The Universities of Erlangen-Nuremberg and Oldenburg and the Freie Universität Berlin function as an interface with science. Nuremberg, which is one of the Top Ten European IT locations and has the third best patent rate in the European-wide IT sector, is also a member of OSBF.
Over 20 OSBF members meanwhile act as foundation coaches, who place their professional experience at the disposal of member companies free of charge. Their services range from setting up high-ranking contacts with international software companies, support for open source technologies and business models, advice on setting up product and sales management, and the development of go-to-market strategies to help in obtaining growth finance through the Business Angel network and venture capital companies.
OSBF’s recipe for success is to network software companies and service firms, venture capital investors, universities and coaches, and to involve OSBF members in attractive projects.

The OSBF projects

The highlights of the many OSBF projects include the annual presentation of the Open Source Business Award (OSBA) worth altogether 75,000 euros for exemplary open source software and business concepts at European level. The target group covers all start-ups in Europe whose business concept is based on software subject to an OSI licence. The winner of the first prize worth 50,000 euros in 2008 was the German company Rapid-I (www.rapid-i.com) with its data mining software Rapid Miner.
Another OSBF project is COSAD (Collaborative Open Source Application Development). The aim of this project is to define the key components for setting up a best-practice consortium for jointly developing open source software. The background: Cooperation between competitors creating software implementations in open source projects reduces the cost-intensive dependency on proprietary software solutions or expensive own developments and therefore saves money.
The aim of OSBF’s Embedded Open Source Cluster Initiative (EOSCI) is to network suppliers and users of embedded systems with each other and with the universities for carrying out joint development projects, making contacts and finding cooperation partners. This involves intensive exchange with the Embedded Systems Institute ESI of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, which gives companies early access to the latest university research developments, tools and ideas. Fields of activity are embedded systems in all segments of mechatronics, automation and consumer electronics, specializing in automotive engineering, medical engineering and communication technology.
The OSBF project Plat_Forms is an international programming competition organized jointly with the FU Berlin and the iX-Magazin (Heise-Verlag). It took place for the first time in 2007 and its aim is to compare various technology platforms for web-based applications: JAVA EE, .NET, PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby on Rails.
OSBF is also partner and supporter of the annual European conference Open Source Meets Business (OSMB).

Incubator for companies

OSBF is responsible for the Linux Business Campus Nuremberg (LBCN), an innovation center it has set up for young companies developing software based on open source. The Business Campus acts as an incubator for open source projects and offers young companies an attractive welcome package, such as rent-free for the first three months, attractive subsequent rents and the use of a shared infrastructure equipped to a high technical standard. The general conditions and personal exchange create a campus culture, which promotes the start-up and future development of young companies. This is supported by the physical proximity to international open source companies like Suse/Novell and Open-Xchange.

Long-term goals

In conjunction with the established and strongly growing future importance of the open source movement, OSBF sees one of its main tasks as association work to position itself more strongly in business, politics and public in order to offer OSBF members location advantages and promote open source.
Under the leadership of board member Frank Sempert, who has excellent network connections with politics, OSBF is working on bringing about a paradigm change in the consideration and rating of open source software and acting as an established association on a par with other associations and as a point of contact for questions or discussions on open source.
Richard Seibt, chairman and initiator of OSBF, particularly sees specific benefits for the members: “We have created OSBF as a nucleus for helping companies to become successful and encouraging prospective entrepreneurs to become self-employed.” Frank Sempert, OSBF board member for association work: “It is of vital concern for our members and the whole open source sector that we finally achieve a paradigm change in the awareness of open source. It is important that we show politics and the public through our specific activities that open source has long grown up and is penetrating all areas of IT in the companies. Open source is no longer a playground for technology-loving software anarchists, but the key field of future IT business. Current studies show that more than 50 per cent of all IT systems worldwide will be based on open source by as early as 2010.”