Two new initiatives are aimed at improving the experience of integrating multiple open-source software elements within organisations.

At LinuxWorld in New York today, a new group focused on interoperability was formed. Called the Open Solutions Alliance, the non-profit organisation is intended to promote interoperability between open-source programs and to market business solutions.

The 10 founding OSA supporters include CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, SourceForge.Net and SpikeSource. Another organisation, systems management firm GroundWork Open Source, has joined since the announcement but many large open-source firms remain conspicuous by their absence, including Red Hat, Novell, MySQL and Ingres, Giants that have been supportive of open-source such as IBM and HP are also not on the current list of backers.

Also, the OSA appears to cut across the turf of other bodies. These include the source-agnostic  Interop Vendor Alliance, which yesterday added Red Hat to members including Microsoft, Sun, EMC, Novell and CA.

Another group, the  Linux Foundation, recently formed with the combination of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, has a stated intention to “promote, protect and standardise Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms”.

However, supporters said the OSA offered significant differentiation.

“What’s unique is that the folks that are part of it represent a number of criti8cal applications for the enterprise, all based on open source,” said Tony Barbagallo, GroundWork vice-president of product management and marketing.

“We look specifically for alliances where there is potential to open lines of communication from a software standpoint.”

Steve Bale, European general manager at EnterpriseDB, said, “The open-source world is nascent compared to the proprietary world and anything we can do to enhance our offering has to be good. We’re small players compared to some but we’re the movers and shakers of open-source applications and we have an interest in making this work.”

Separately, SpikeSource said it will add the Ubuntu Linux distribution to the roster of open-source software it certifies to run together in pre-tested stacks.