Cisco To Open-Source New Messaging Protocol

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.'"

Comments

ZeroC's ICE

[bheer]

It'll be interesting to compare Etch to ICE, which is a GPL'd open-source, cross-language RPC toolkit (you can buy commerical licenses too). It's quite widely used by banks and is generally reckoned to be speedy.

Re:GPL

[superskippy]

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.

Re:GPL

[Teckla]

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.

Re:GPL

[ruin20]

I've never met a GPL code developer who released his code under GPL because he was forced. I support GPL because I believe if something is important it should be codified and that if you develop something for the community you should protect it for the community. But that doesn't mean that releasing something under an FOSS license without a "recontribute/openness" clause doesn't mean that there won't be active community development. Something built on and from sharing will always foster more sharing, it's an issue of principal.