Open Source Solutions

I met with Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder & CTO of WSO2 at OSBC 2008. Paul and WSO2 CEO Sanjiva Weerawarana both come from IBM Web Services architecture and founded WSO2 to provide an IBM level of quality of service in a simpler implementation. I was actually introduced to Paul and Sanjiva about an half-hour before our scheduled interview by our mutual friend Gianugo Rabellino. Here's some of the information that Paul provided about WSO2.

WS* for security & messaging is a major focus for WSO2, and WSO2 is filling some of the gaps we mentioned in our "suggested topics" for OSTT, especially in the area of exposing data through WSO2 Data Services and Governance in the WSO2 Registry:

• RESTful not UDDI
• ATOMpub
• Social Governance: Tags, Comments, Ratings, subscribe via any feed reader to tags, versions, etc.

Independent security through WSO2 User Manager or standard APIs and applications

Fifty percent of the WSO2 developers times is spent in Apache projects, and the company is 95% engineering. This shows one of the strengths of Open Source in that the company is not heavy with GS&A costs.

As anyone reading this blogs knows, we feel that Community is the major strength of any Open Source company. The WSO2 Community provides requirements & bug fixes, primarily. One recent example of the value of the WSO2 community is where Hessian provided requirements & testing.

WSO2 is very much a platform company, much like Spring. WSO2 worked with Spring to have Apache Axis2 work as a component within Spring using Axiom (AXis Object Model).

1. Spring WS requires Contract First
2. The WSO2 framework for Spring allows POJO Code First

The Axis2 beta was published six weeks ago and a GRAILS contributor has already contributed a plugin to the community that is dependent upon the WSO2 web services framework for Spring.

Business models for Open Source companies are still being developed. WSO2 achieves monetization through subscription, training, developer support [email & IM] and product support. All WSO2 products fall under Apache Licenses.

In addition, WSO2 provides Open Source Development: customers pay to get customizations into the main tree of the code base of Apache projects that are important to them. This is a great way to provide support to your favorite open source project.

We ran out of time at this point. In conclusion, we feel that WSO2 is filling some of the gaps in open source products for SOA, as well as having some unique approaches in extending their business model.