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On Thursday August 9, ebizQ presented Mark Driver of Gartner discussing the relationship of open source software (OSS) to services oriented architecture (SOA). You can still listen to the webinar but you missed the chance to participate. So the purpose of this post is to provide a reprise of the key issues raised in the session. By the way, Red Hat sponsored the event and some of the questions were answered by Burr Sutter, Red Hat's director of product management, who was also on the panel.

Attendees wanted the panel to talk about the difference between OSS and open standards. One felt that participating in the SOA standards movement would provide his or her enterprise stronger investment protection than access to particular code, or the right to distribute it. Good point and it represents the different sides of the same coin.
-- OSS guarantees enterprises access to the code and the right to upgrade/improve that code even if the company or community that provided it goes out of business or disbands. For more details about our view of the OSS world, see the Features section under this tab and this taxonomy document in particular
-- While standards can provide a similar advantage, IT history shows us that standards are more about least-common-denominator functionality, not usually what an enterprise wants if the code is providing competitive advantage. But SOA standards are critical to intercompany activity such as supply chain management or CRM among business partners. If that is more important to your IT strategy than internal code that supports competitive advantage, working with the standards movement would be a better way to support IT community.

There tends to be such a standards movement in every industry. Of course, if you have the resources (who does these days), you can do both.

Another question was, “What's the driver for business to adopt OSS-based SOA?” These are two different questions really (and then I’ll try to put the answers together in the next paragraph). The drivers for the architecture are the ability to build utility-like computing for your enterprise or organization with benefits such as service level agreements, grid infrastructure for protection against “power outages,” unit-based metering of compute power and more. The drivers for the OSS development model are the protection against a company or organization disbanding as described above, faster bug fixes and other quality assurance facets, and less vendor lock-in.

In short, SOA is an architecture and OSS is a development model and the two together complement each other with benefits that do not overlap.

The $64,000 question was “Mission critical apps are often considered too important to put on OSS platforms. What are some of the arguments against that view? As I said in the session, the flip answer is “Google.” Both Burt and Mark went into more detail. I don’t believe anyone is peddling the canard that OSS is not ready for primetime anymore but if you hear it, consider all the companies and organizations that have already crossed over from a proprietary UNIX distribution to Linux. There are similar examples up and down the stack.

Overall it was a great session with another half dozen questions like the above. To “attend in arrears” and at least hear the answers directly, click on the Webinars tab on the upper left and then click on the Archived Webinars link. Look for the 8/9/2007 webinar titled “Optimizing Open Source and SOA Strategies.” You’ll have to sign up for the ebizQ Gold Club if you have not already; it’s free.

And if you still have a question you wished you’d been there to ask, do not hesitate to email me at dennis at ebizq-dot-net. And save the dates October 30-31 for ebizQ's two-day virtual conference on SOA In Action where we'll talk move about the convergence of OSS and SOA.

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