The South East Asia SOA Weblog

The solutions now offered in Open Source for implementing SOA have begun to provide extensive value but customers and systems integrators should be cautious and think strategically when assessing the value of these solutions. Projects such as WS02 and semi-open source (non-GPL, non-BSD, non-Apache) solutions such as Intalio BPMS are now comparable and even superior to many or even all their closed source counterparts. Considering some of the open source licenses offered by vendors it is necessary to take a cautious and well informed approach to open source offerings. Many of these solutions are contrived contributions that do not have a strong 3rd party developer community and are principally developed by one vendor with the dubious goal of proliferating their software and gaining the mind-share of the broader developer community. In my opinion the strategic focus of customers seeking open source solutions should be on those open source vendors licensing completely open and community driven software licenses along with support and subscription based licensing. In general customers should be cautions of vendors offering so called open source or community editions and a so called closed source enterprise edition. Watch this space for updates.