The Open Solutions Alliance has released an assessment of free software growth and the directions the movement will take in 2008. This is an interesting group that is new on the scene, having just been formed in November 2006. They appear to have put some thought into their predictions report, which you can download as a PDF.

The founding companies of this alliance are an interesting mix: “Adaptive Planning, Centric CRM, CollabNet, EnterpriseDB, Hyperic, JasperSoft, Openbravo, SourceForge.net, SpikeSource and Talend.”

This is what it looks like when huge, multinational corporations start “moving into the open source space” — the Instituto Nokia de Tecnologia is “focused on four major research areas: Mechanics & Electronic Assemblies; Open Source; Mobile Solutions & Services and Operations & Logistics.” And it “maintains partnerships with the main universities and research centers in the world, in countries such as Germany, United States, Finland and Brazil.”

And, they are hosting a conference called Bossa 2008: International Conference on Open Source Software for Mobile Embedded Platforms in Porto de Galinhas, Pernambuco, Brazil.