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MOM and SOA on Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the three-lettered-acronyms-as-buzzwords dept.

dogmeant asks: "I have yet to see MOM (message oriented middleware) offerings on Linux much less open source projects that address the same. And while we're at it, what about tools that address SOA/BPM (Service oriented architecture/business process modeling) type architectures on Linux? Is the Open Source community ready to take on challenges like this?" If anyone else out there has this particular itch, maybe this will be another niche in which Open Source software can catch some Enterprise mindshare.

1 of 48 comments (clear)

  1. It goes deeper than that. by FreeLinux · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a common situation in open source and I don't see it changing anytime soon. The fact is that apps such as middleware are business apps. They aren't terribly sexy or cool. They are however, important to business and are usually specific to a particular business.

    On the other hand, it seems that most open source developers are motivated to scratch their own itch. They are drawn to apps that are cool and apps that meet their needs. This is perfectly understandable but, it does result in a derth of open source business apps that are either mundane or just plain boaring. For this reason, open source offers an emormous assortment of "toy" apps. There are countless cd burners/rippers, MP3/Ogg players/encoders, Linux utilities and so forth. There are also a ridiculous amount of frameworks and libraries, usually all repeating the same theme. If I see another "yet another framework" project I'm going to be sick.

    There are only a few business type open source projects and even fewer ones that could be considered mature enough and good enough to run your business on them. If a business wants a particular app they must build it themselves. This of course costs money and in some cases it costs a huge amount of money. And there in lies the problem. Most businesses that have spent large amounts of money on development are not interested or willing to give it away by making their project open source. For these two reasons there are very few business type open source apps like middleware and it will be a long time before there are, if ever.