ESB Initiative Welcomes New Member Iona

One year after its inception, of the "ESB initiative" brings major results.

Too often, open-source projects today are purely technology driven - the rationale being meritocracy and technical savvyness. This is pretty unreallistic to think that in the modern world, technology for the sake of it may be the way to go. There is no denying there's room for technology driven open-source projects, but the market is now asking for software that answer business needs.

A way to go is to create a company with a business model centered around one open-source platform -- and more often reatining a stranglehold over the project, hence departing from the open-source spirit and ending up with "proprietary open-source". We in ObjectWeb believe there's room for collaborative efforts that involve more than one single company. And we believe they can be driven by market trends and address market segments.

This was the purpose of the "ESB initiative". The ESB initiative is not an open-source project. It is not a technology platform. It is a first try at what may be a market-driven, yet business neutral, way of developping open-source software.

ESBi attracted several new members and new projects (see here, here, here, here). Today, Iona announced they join ObjectWeb and contribute to the ESBi. This is a significant announcement! ObjectWeb confirms its position as the leading open-source community in business integration.

The project started and lead by Iona is named Celtix. It'll be licensed under LGPL. Paul Krill in InfoWorld: "Similar to other open source business models, Iona hopes to leverage Celtix by providing value-added services and enticing some Celtix customers to purchase Artix."

ObjectWeb Executive Director Christophe Ney said: “IONA will bring recognized expertise to the ObjectWeb community and its contribution will tremendously increase the momentum of the ESBi. For these reasons, we see Celtix as a natural extension to the projects currently hosted by ObjectWeb. Additionally, synergy with other ObjectWeb projects offers the real opportunity for Celtix to serve as a key element in an open source business integration toolbox comprised of both existing and future ESBi projects.”

Think of ESBi as a toolbox, that users or vendors, can use to create their own added value offer. No SPOF in the ecosystem. We anticipate that several differentiated and competitive offers would appear soon on the market -- one being that of Iona. Some ObjectWeb members already have offerings: eg Open Wide with Nosica. Some are working on new projects but - hush - nothing is certain yet.