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Cisco To Open-Source New Messaging Protocol

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the would-you-like-to-see-my-etchings dept.

Esther Schindler writes "Do you use SOAP, CORBA or EJBs? You might want to take a look at Etch, writes James Turner for CIO.com. It's language-, platform- and transport-agnostic, and Cisco is planning to release it as open source. Certainly, it offers some technical benefits: 'In addition to a simplified configuration, Etch also promises less overhead over the wire, compared to SOAP. In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip, company officials stated.' And the open source part? Cisco is in the process of deciding what license to use. 'The intent is to use a less restrictive license than GPL, perhaps Apache or Mozilla. This is to allow commercial developers to incorporate Etch into products without licensing issues. A final announcement on the licensing decision will be available in the next month.'"

8 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. GPL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Glad to see more and more companies moving away from GPL, understanding that it will only limit the potential adoption. As a highly respected registered member of the Slashdot community, I'm posting as AC as this post will very likely be modded troll.

    1. Re:GPL by Shadow-isoHunt · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You care too much about your karma - regardless of if your post is being sarcastic or not - say what you mean and mean what you say, stand behind it because we won't believe an AC anyways.

      --
      www.isoHunt.com
    2. Re:GPL by superskippy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sorry to feed the troll, but the point of the GPL is not to increase adoption. Your absolutely right to say that other licenses will lead to greater adoption- but this is adoption by people who may take, take, take and not give back.
      Besides, it sounds like LGPL is what's needed in this case, anyhow.

    3. Re:GPL by Teckla · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sorry to feed the troll, but the point of the GPL is not to increase adoption. Your absolutely right to say that other licenses will lead to greater adoption- but this is adoption by people who may take, take, take and not give back.

      The company I work for sells closed source software. We also use some open source software (not GPL) in the product.

      We contribute back to the open source we use because it's more sensible. Adding the same features back in again and again would be counterproductive. We'd rather they get added to the open source project permanently.

      We have a blanket ban on using GPL'd source, though. We can't afford to GPL our entire 20 million line software stack, which would be the result of using even a tiny bit of GPL code.

      Try to understand that not everyone loves the GPL and not everyone that doesn't love the GPL is a troll.

      Now it's my turn to get modded into oblivion for not being fond of the GPL. Sigh.

  2. Re:Um, what? by RodgerDodger · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You open-source a protocol by providing a specification with no attached IP rights, such as patents covering the protocol. A reference implementation kind of helps, too.

    --
    "Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
  3. Re:Um, what? by Timothy+Brownawell · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wouldn't that be "open spec" instead of "open source", with the open source reference implementation being a separate issue?

  4. Re:Cisco, Please use the LGPLv3 license. by Richard_at_work · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sod the libraries, license them however you wish - give us full and unfettered access to the specifications so those of us that wish to produce a BSD licensed or Public Domain set of libraries can do so. Don't assume that any license you choose for the libraries today will be good enough for everyone tomorrow.

  5. Re:Distributed computing. by gbjbaanb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Both those protocols suffer from 1 problem: bloat. The reason they're bloated and inefficient is because a committee decided how and what to add to the protocol once it was initiated, and we all know how well that works out.

    SOAP was a 'quick and dirty solution (by Don Box IIRC) to (apart from getting a job at MS :) ) transfer COM calls over a http tunnel instead of the usual DCE-RPC tunnel, and it worked well when you only wanted to send a request to an object. Obviously, it has to have a webserver on the other end which slows it down tremendously, and then they added support for all kinds of complex types and a large schema as well. I'm surprised it works at all after seeing the raw WSDL code!

    CORBA... designed by committee to do everything including transport kitchen sinks.

    Since I've been working in the industry there is a tendency for supposedly bright people to take something simple and 'make it a general purpose solution' or 'implement some framework features' which nearly always breaks it into a bloated POS far removed from the original, simple, easy to use, and effective solution.

    I welcome Cisco's new protocol, I don't care if it doesn't do everything I might possibly ever want to do, as long as it does the majority of my work quickly and simply. I can work around the edge cases myself, possibly even (gosh!) redesigning the way those edge cases work.