Dana Gardner suggests that there is growing evidence of a synergy between open source and SOA. He references a recent report by Forrester which Dana says adds to:
Dana believes that a series of recent announcements in the community show that 2007 will see open source drive SOA adoption even further.
"... the compelling economics that bind open source products and SOA activities."The report mentions that of 400 executives surveyed, 71% of them view open source as either "important" or "very important" for consolidating their IT infrastructure. Plus, 57% said that they saw open source as "important" or "very important" for facilitating a migration to SOA. According to Forrester, 78% believed that the open standards approach typically taken by open source software is a major factor driving their view of its value for SOA next-generation enterprise architectures.
Dana believes that a series of recent announcements in the community show that 2007 will see open source drive SOA adoption even further.
Most importantly is the expected delivery in Q4 of this year of a comprehensive open source SOA platform stack from Red Hat and its JBoss unit. The goal is to take the best of open source platform, middleware, tools, and SOA infrastructure (such as ESBs) and package them for volume viral delivery to the market, with a simplified pricing model (based on a “server instance”) for support.Furthermore, recent interviews with IONA Technologies around CXF (the Apache merger of XFire and the Celtix ESB), the CEO of SourceLabs (who are attempting to “professionalize” the adoption of open source components, making it “safe and easy,” as well as “dependable”), and a new SOA project in Eclipse from Deutsche Post World Net, are further evidence that open source is not lagging behind the traditional proprietary vendor approaches, as has often been the case in the past. As the article mentions:
SourceLabs expects open source for SOA to be huge, and it is gearing up to manage the movement to and support of open source code products for SOA ...However, it's not all a bed of roses. Celtix wasn't really going anywhere when it was within ObjectWeb. The Eclipse STP project (an attempt to provide a toolset for SOA) is still struggling to gain acceptance over the WTP project. As with all successful open source, the community adoption/following is often as important as (and sometimes more important than) the technology. Whether 2007 is really going to see open source leading the way with SOA adoption remains to be seen. However, it does seem clear from the amount of open source efforts in and around SOA, that developers and adopters are taking open source solutions seriously.