In Exist Global, the Open Source Software (OSS) movement meets MyFace - Open Source Software Up the Stack

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January 11, 2008
In Exist Global, the Open Source Software (OSS) movement meets MyFace

This post might belong more on a corporate law web page—or in a merger and acquisition (M&A) roundup—than on an open source software (OSS) blog. But buried in some intercontinental corporate merger and acquisition news this week was a couple of factoids that piqued my curiosity. One was the mention of Winston Damarillo, chairman of the two companies that merged: Exist Global, a software engineering services firm headquartered in the Philippines, and DevZuz, a developer of delivery platforms that link enterprise businesses to application development projects and processes. The other factoid was all the interconnected OSS aspects of the merger.

Winston is interesting because he is also a founder of Webtide and chairman of Morph Labs and was a founder of Gluecode, which was sold to IBM in 2005, and LogicBlaze, which was acquired by Iona in 2007. These companies have products that are outgrowths of Apache Software Foundation (ASF) or other OSS-related projects—the Jetty Java web container, the Amazon EC2 environment, the Geronimo application server and the Synapse integration broker respectively. The latter became IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, and part of Iona’s FUSE respectively.

So I had to catch up with Winston and ask him what commercial developments of OSS efforts we should expect out of the newly expanded Exist. His answer is a very interesting vision of a utility-based delivery grid for software projects being developed by programmers based all over the world. Exist has a project called DEN, DevZuz brings a project called CodeAtlas, and Mergere (which had previously been merged into Damarillo’s Simula Labs to form DevZuz) brings Maestro.

Don’t try to keep track of the M&A machinations; the interesting stuff is in putting it all together. Den uses Apache Maven, Continuum and Archiva. Ditto for Maestro which builds standardization, dependency management, continuous integration, and comprehensive reporting, into the grid. CodeAtlas offers a software sourcing repository technology that connects developers and software components in a social networking model where developers can “rank and rate” the work they are collaborating on as well as other projects they get involved in. This is MyFace for the OSS community (that analogy assumes I correctly understand what my grandkids are doing on MyFace).

More in my world, it looks like SourceForge meets Eclipse “in the cloud.” As such it allows ISVs to give and get extensions to their core work, partners to do Ajax etc., and offers advanced software expertise to large end users that might not be able to afford that expertise on staff or only need it for a finite length of time.

The combined entity will do business as Exist Global. Established in 2001, Exist Global, with more than 150 developers worldwide, is one of the largest strategic engineering services firm in East Asia. Winston is also a member of the Eclipse board so we are going to try to catch up with him for an upcoming podcast.