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October's Service Oriented Architecture in Action virtual tradeshow here on ebizQ.net, at which I spoke, got me to thinking. About how SOA and open source software (OSS) fit together. One thing is critical to the thinking; SOA requires thousands of services to be successful. It will take OSS to provide those thousands of services because the vendor community cannot possibly provide them all.

It’s cosmic thinking. Because It begs the question whether OSS will develop like the long promised software factory of the future or like the cottage industry it has been since it started. If I were Carl Sagan, this would be all kind of the spinning wheel vs. the cotton gin sort of stuff. But you don’t have to go back that far—or go that far afield from software development to get the picture. The OSS movement has tended to revolve around a white paper called the Cathedral vs. the Bazzaar, by Eric Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative group.

This four to five minute podcast goes into more detail. In addition, we will shortly have a podcast featuring Michael Tiemann, current executive director of the Open Source Initiative and you can hear about some of the key issues Michael sees for the organization. Maybe we’ll ask him the question: software factory or cottage industry?

Also if you want to skip the cosmic thinking about SOA and OSS, I will shortly complete a feature article on some of the issues IT staffs need to consider when choosing whether to use OSS in SOA. And the presentation I gave at the SOA in Action conference on ebizQ is also available for replay at the URL noted above.

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