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Following up on the April 10 announcement that Iona acquired LogicBlaze, I “met” this week with James Strachan, the Chief Architect and co-founder of LogicBlaze, and a mover and shaker of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Like Jim Jagielski of ASF and Covalent whom you met last week, Strachan came to open source software (OSS) from the IT end-user side (is there a trend here?). Strachan began his IT career out of the Univ. of Manchester in the hothouse of middleware, the financial services industry. Early employers included JPMorgan Chase, Nomura Research Institute, and Dresdner Bank. But, not a total neophyte to the supply side, James also developed software for NEON (later acquired by Sybase), and founded SpiritSoft, a UK company that provided enterprise Java middleware between 1997-2005 and that was acquired by SeeBeyond (later acquired by Sun). The four appearances of the words “acquired by” in this first paragraph tells you all you need to know about the middleware business (I can put you in touch with the founders of HyperDesk if you send me an email).

The “acquired by” mantra also probably has a lot to do with James Strachan’s philosophy of OSS. Realizing from both his supply- and user-side work that middleware was rapidly becoming a commodity, he was one of the founders of the Apache Geronimo J2EE application server project, Groovy, dom4j, jaxen, and Jelly as well as the Apache ActiveMQ project, with which LogicBlaze is so closely aligned. He is also an active committer on a variety of leading OSS projects including Spring, Maven and Jakarta Commons, and has taken the specifications lead on JSR 241 (while “sitting in” on JSR 52, 107, 127, 152, 174, 208, and 223 meetings).

From his work in the “the City” (UK for “on Wall Street”) and with the software suppliers, he realized that in the long term middleware would go open source. In fact, someone would have had to invent the OSS business model for middleware if it had not already been invented for commodity software such as utilities and operating systems further down the stack. James feels that there might be a long-term need for proprietary high-performance middleware (e.g., for spooks and stocks) but that otherwise it is hard to justify commercial software business models for middleware today, especially for midsized enterprises. That works two ways:
-- Midsize companies can’t spend a lot of money to do the simple things that application servers and message brokers do. These companies, he says, cannot afford to pay large up-front license fees by the server or platform but will spend on consulting, training, etc. to support OSS middleware.
-- Similarly, smaller software vendors with good integration middleware technology can’t survive outside the OSS model because of the cost of sales finding prospects and the length of negotiations in big WebLogic or WebSphere type deals. But with an OSS model, it is much easier to get customers (in fact, he says, LogicBlaze can’t keep up with requests for service).

That’s why the Iona deal was a good fit with LogicBlaze. Iona brings the resources LogicBlaze needs to handle all those requests for service. And James believes Iona “buys into” the OSS model. Unlike large systems middleware suppliers such as BEA and IBM, whom he says see OSS as an “on-ramp” to their proprietary middleware products. Iona sees its “commercial pieces” fitting well into an OSS “foundation” such as ActiveMQ. Even before the acquisition, Iona used ActiveMQ code in its Celtix enterprise service bus.

Strachan recalled that the ActiveMQ started 4 years ago as side project to the Apache Geronimo effort. He joined from his work with ASF although he notes that the JMS container that became ActiveMQ started at Codehaus. That type of cooperation within the OSS culture is fascinating to watch (as is the opposite trend; e.g., how the other guys that hatched Geronimo left the JBoss community and went through very un-OSS-like legalities).

Rev 5 of ActiveMQ is a couple of months away. James believes it is as good as most commercial message brokers since the development community has cherrypicked good idea from the last 20 years. He says the group is also very proud of innovate features that even commercial message brokers do not have such as:
-- Message groups
for web style “sticky” load balancing
for correlating different threads in database caching
-- A new form of failover support
As with Covalent/Apache Tomcat, Iona/Apache ActiveMQ is a great example of how the business side and community side of OSS come together.

Posted by dennisb in OSS Development |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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