Much like Microsoft, SAP has never been seen as a friend of the open source community. But that may be starting to change.
At last week’s Open Source Convention (OSCON), SAP manned a booth on the show floor for the first time ever. The German firm is supporting two open source cloud computing projects: Cloud Foundry and OpenStack. In addition, it has launched an open source project of its own called OpenUI5, and company executives say they are now allowing their developers to consume and contribute to open source projects. It’s too soon to call the company a true open source advocate, but it is taking steps in that direction.
Microsoft, of course, has also been warming to open source and had a surprisingly large presence at OSCON as well.