Wednesday, October 11, 2006
BEA hits out at open source...
Did the folks at Infoworld get it twisted when discussing the BEA Perspective on open source?
Large enterprises are starting to pay attention to open source which causes the vendors that do business with them to device plans that align with this notion. In the early days, enterprisey folks were happy with vendors simply contributing to open standards (this of course is distinct from open source) but this no longer makes folks happy. I suspect that the biggest pain point in many large enterprises is the need to account for licenses. I know whenever I am at work, the word "inventory" periodically comes out and in my own mind is a four letter word.
Open source has the ability to free enterprise architecture teams from the notion of inventory and instead focus in on paying for things not when they are used but when they start to add business value. BEA as a company is IMHO a company that gets the notion of adding value.
I wonder what the folks at Infoworld would say if BEA were to publicly commit to making Weblogic Server 10.1 100% open source? Would they respect BEA or would they say that they are late to the game and that they are jumping into a crowded field that JBoss and others already occupy?
For the record, most magazines frustrate me in that they tell the story that is easiest to tell without regard to actually doing any deep research. I wonder what it would take for them to equally pick on all the other large software vendors who also don't have a strong open source story such as CA or Oracle?
BEA has contributed source code to the community such as XMLBeans and other components used by software developers. I would like to know if Infoworld, Gartner and Forrester would provide deeper coverage on the BEA value proposition if BEA were to not only evangelize their own product offerings but were to contribute software development expertise to existing open source projects in the ESB space such as ServiceMix, in the Portal space such as Liferay and even in the security space by helping other products implement the XACML PEP specification that I frequently mention?
Maybe I should ask BEA bloggers such as Josh Bregman, Jon Mountjoy, Kavindra Patel, and Wendy Bales to provide their own perspective of open source independent of BEAs direction in this regard in a public manner...
| | View blog reactionsLarge enterprises are starting to pay attention to open source which causes the vendors that do business with them to device plans that align with this notion. In the early days, enterprisey folks were happy with vendors simply contributing to open standards (this of course is distinct from open source) but this no longer makes folks happy. I suspect that the biggest pain point in many large enterprises is the need to account for licenses. I know whenever I am at work, the word "inventory" periodically comes out and in my own mind is a four letter word.
Open source has the ability to free enterprise architecture teams from the notion of inventory and instead focus in on paying for things not when they are used but when they start to add business value. BEA as a company is IMHO a company that gets the notion of adding value.
I wonder what the folks at Infoworld would say if BEA were to publicly commit to making Weblogic Server 10.1 100% open source? Would they respect BEA or would they say that they are late to the game and that they are jumping into a crowded field that JBoss and others already occupy?
For the record, most magazines frustrate me in that they tell the story that is easiest to tell without regard to actually doing any deep research. I wonder what it would take for them to equally pick on all the other large software vendors who also don't have a strong open source story such as CA or Oracle?
BEA has contributed source code to the community such as XMLBeans and other components used by software developers. I would like to know if Infoworld, Gartner and Forrester would provide deeper coverage on the BEA value proposition if BEA were to not only evangelize their own product offerings but were to contribute software development expertise to existing open source projects in the ESB space such as ServiceMix, in the Portal space such as Liferay and even in the security space by helping other products implement the XACML PEP specification that I frequently mention?
Maybe I should ask BEA bloggers such as Josh Bregman, Jon Mountjoy, Kavindra Patel, and Wendy Bales to provide their own perspective of open source independent of BEAs direction in this regard in a public manner...
