There’s a fantastic article in this week’s issue of InformationWeek written by Charlie Babcock – somebody who seems to be able to cover nearly any high tech subject without skipping a beat. You just need to take a quick look at his bio page to see the diversity of what he reports on for the publication.
In “How To Tell The Open Source Winners From The Losers”, Charlie tackles the issue of open source from a business perspective and does a very good job of providing corporate users with a set of criteria they should evaluate to make sure an open source technology is right for them. He also looks at why some open source projects are so successful and why so many languish. It’s a great read and very insightful, and will likely open some eyes and change some perceptions about open source.
I’d also like to think that the next time Charlie or InformationWeek visits this subject, readers will see Celtix Enterprise (IONA’s open source ESB distribution) or the CXF project at Apache (the project on which Celtix Enterprise is based) on the list of potential winners in the battle for the hearts and minds of developers and users. Seeing that Celtix was just announced in December of ’06 and that CXF has only been in the Apache community since August of ’06, it’s really hard to see this as snub.
That being said, we’re starting to see a lot of interest in the project and in our distribution as more folks out there realize that the open source community, and the technologies that are being developed there, may be an extremely efficient and cost-effective way to begin their SOA deployments.