| ||||||||
|
|
|
| Elizabeth Kratz |
Elizabeth Kratz's Business Agility WatchebizQ editor-in-chief Elizabeth Kratz gives a daily dose of Web happenings for the business technology industry; the industry that builds, powers and ensures business success. |
|
January 24, 2007
Guest Post: Merger: Open Source Development Labs and Free Standards Group Today, I welcome a guest post from Open Source expert and future ebizQ Open Source blogger, Dennis Byron. From Dennis Byron:* Look at the leading information technology (IT) suppliers’ activity today and you will find what’s happening to the Open Source/Linux movement now happened a decade ago in the Open Software/Unix movement. This week’s merger of Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group into the Linux Foundation is Exhibit A. The powers that be could have even used the same press release they used 11 years ago (see press release February 11, 1996) in merging X/Open and the Open Software Foundation (OSF) into The Open Group. X/Open like FSG was a specification and certification “group” that tried to help overcome the by-then multiple forking of UNIX. OSF like OSDL was a consortium founded by DEC, HP, IBM and other corporate players to promote a single UNIX. Although the 1996 merger turned out to be too little too late, I think this week’s announcement might be meaningful. It is a sign of maturity for open source software (OSS), along with events such as the Microsoft/Novell announcement of November 2006, giving users a choice in the enterprise or in your personal life: OSS where it makes sense, Microsoft where it makes sense, legacy systems and software where they make sense. The open choice idea is reflected on the Linux Foundation’s web site (especially in a Jan 22 New York Times story on the merger) and perhaps signals a change from some of the OSS vs. Microsoft (and Microsoft vs. OSS) tirades that have permeated OSS discussions for the last few years (and as recently as December 2006 with the absurd badvista.org promotion). After all, open source software has been around since the first meeting of Share in 1955. As a sidelight, I asked the Linux Foundation: “Why highlight “Linux” in the name and not some variation of “open source?”, which would imply a broader mandate. It could be as simple as that this is the place where Linus Torvalds draws his pay. But I suspect it has more to do with not competing with that other group IBM and others created 11 years ago. I’ll let you know if they get back to us with a more strategic answer.
Posted by elizabeth in Standards | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) July 24, 2006Dana Gardner Podcast on Eclipse Dana Gardner has a podcast up today about why software vendors have embraced Eclipse, the open source standards organization. Joining Dana on the podcast are BEA Systems' Bill Roth, the vice president of the BEA Workshop Business Unit, and Wind River's Steve Heintz, the director of product management for developer technologies. Have a listen as "we learn why very different large software tools, platform, and runtimes providers are hip to Eclipse. And they also see Eclipse as a model of other software projects to come." Posted by elizabeth in Standards | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) May 17, 2006Live from SOA Exec Forum: Steve Vinoski from IONA on Standards Joining Linthicum on the standards panel at InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum was Steve Vinoski, CTO of IONA Technologies. His thoughts on standards: "Standards are basically a necessary evil. I can't stand working on standards myself, but I know that customers look to companies like IONA for standards, and it's important for us to help fill them out in an organized way. "There are people whose whole job is to write standards. They're in meetings constantly, and if they're not in meetings, they're discussing the next meeting. These people never write a line of code. You really have to be in there doing it to understand it. "The second problem is the vendors don't really take in user considerations. They see a space and rush to develop a spec for it. But the fact that they just taking something they've developed and try to develop standards to match it, without having it vetted by users. "The users do really have to get involved in standards," Steve said. An elected member of the board of directors of OASIS took exception to the prevailing beliefs of the panel members that standards bodies don't ever get involved with users. A great debate! Posted by elizabeth in Standards | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) Live from SOA Exec Forum: Linthicum on Standards David Linthicum, ebizQ blogger and CEO of BridgeWERX, joins a high-level panel here at InfoWorld's SOA Executive Forum, discussing where we are in the different stacks and the status of standards and standards organizations in the integration space. The panel sort of agreed that the trouble with standards right now is that there are now no base protocols, no fully developed programs that encompass all that standards could be. But Dave said, "Every SOA out there is different. So that this notion that we could have this stack, or one set of standards for SOA, is ABSURD. Understand that if you're going to get into this game you're going to have to spend a lot of time understanding your own requirements. "The architectures have different needs, different specs, and there's no way to standardize this. This isn't really my opinion, it's fact," Dave said. Dave was asked when he thinks the time will be right for standards. Here are some of his comments: "I'm sort of the Wilford Brimley of the SOA world. I'm telling you it's hard when the marketing people are saying it's easy. The people who write to my blog and send me emails and call in to the podcast, they're confused. "I'm very bullish on standards. But today there are standards being created for the selfish needs of the vendors. And the reality of it if you want to get into a space is that you develop the technology, then write the standard, and then try to get it adopted by a standards body. It's inhibiting the growth of the market. "What needs to happen is that the user communities need to push back on the number and confusion of standards. Should probably have single instances of standards, come to an agreement of what needs to be in the stack. "Going forward, I'm seeing another disturbing trend. There are standards that exist that are not yet fully developed. BPEL is an example of this. Using Oracle or IBM BPEL stacks, they are not going to have portability from stack to stack. It's very disturbing that the biggest companies are doing this." Posted by elizabeth in Standards | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) May 03, 2006OASIS Standardizes Business-Centric Methodology OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, today announced a new standard for business-centric methodology. You can read the release here, but to provide a quick explanation, I'm told BCM "addresses interoperability through the semantic alignment of concepts and layering of constraints, as defined by reusable business templates." OASIS said that plans are in the works to develop a business-centric framing language that will use 'service bridges' to ensure information used by one layer of SOA is accurately communicated to the other BCM layers. OASIS also intend to develop an ontology for eBusiness that resides in the concept layer to ensure semantic synchronicity across all BCM layers. OASIS invites interested parties to exchange information on implementing BCM via the bcm-dev mailing list). If anyone is a 'BCM' expert around here, and would like to write an article on it for ebizQ, please let me know. Posted by elizabeth in Standards | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |
Podcast Feed
Marketing Solutions | Feedback | About ebizQ | Unsubscribe | Privacy Policy | Site Map