Open-source and SOA articles
Some interesting articles these days about Open-Source and Service Oriented Architecture. Main objectives of these articles are to illustrate that open-source SOA solutions are ready for enterprise use.

The first paper, called Enterprise Open Source and SOA, is from Eric Newcomer a well known technical evangelist from IONA in the the last Enterprise Open Source Journal (July/August 2006) available from http://www.eosj.com/ . It describes main components of SOA infrastructure and list available business ready open-source SOA stacks from Apache, Eclipse, ObjectWeb, Red-hat and Sun.

The second paper is from Adam Michelson in SearchWebServices.com and is available here, it is called "SOA ready for download". Even if this last article is far from being as exhaustive as the previous one (in particular Petals the JBI compliant ESB from ObjectWeb is missing) it give us a snapshot of some industrial open-source solutions for SOA.

Writely

Voici un test de Writely (http://www.writely.com) l'éditeur collaboratif racheté par Google. Semble tout à fait intéressant pour publier les blogs.

Le correcteur orthographique ne semble pas disponible en Français.

Un jeu de fonctionnalité intéressant.

Quantification de réseaux sociaux

D’autres règles encore très discuté (et discutable) ont été proposées afin de quantifier quelques dimensions de réseaux sociaux :

• En 1967, le psychologue américain Stanley Milgram décrivait le «small world phenomenon» en montrant qu'il existait en moyenne six intermédiaires entre deux personnes prises au hasard sur la planète Terre.

• Dunbar (Anthropologue anglais du milieu des années 1990) prétend que le nombre d'amis avec lesquels une personne peut entretenir une relation stable à un moment donné de sa vie est limité : le fameux nombre de Dunbar (issue de La théorie du « gossip »). Cette limite serait inhérente à la taille de notre néocortex. Elle est estimée à 150 personnes.

Génèse des communautés virtuelles

Un mémoire tout à fait intéressant concernant les communautés vituelles de Paul Oberson – La genèse des communautés virtuelles –  (http://tecfa.unige.ch/staf/staf-f/oberson/memoire/mem.pdf)

L'auteur tente de définir une démarche de création (le bootstrap) de communautés virtuelles en essayant d'identifier les contextes favorables.

Il définie un cycle de vie typique pour de tels réseaux et met en évidence des indicateurs quantitatifs associés.

On y apprend notamment :

• Metcalfe, l’un des inventeur de l’Ethernet, propose une loi qui décrit l’augmentation de valeur de ce type de réseau. Sa loi s’appuie sur un principe fondamental des réseaux : le nombre de connections potentielles entre les nœuds d’un réseau croit plus rapidement que le nombre de noeuds. La valeur totale d’un réseau où chaque noeud peut atteindre tous les autres augmente du carré du nombre de noeuds. Il s’agit donc d’une croissance qui suit une progression asymptotique. Les conséquences de cette loi sont évidentes et favorisent une philosophie de collaboration. Connecter deux réseaux crée beaucoup plus de valeur que la somme des valeurs de chaque réseau.

• Reed , reprenant la loi de Metcalfe, s’est rendu compte que dans les réseaux autorisant la création de sous-groupes, le développement global était accéléré et devenait exponentiel. La communication humaine rajoute une valeur à la vitesse de développement du réseau. La possibilité de créer des sous-groupes n’incluant qu’une partie des membres du réseau pour développer des échanges plus ciblés autorise un potentiel beaucoup plus élevé.

Why open-source is so important for Europe

Some insight about open-source and why it is so important for European research program, in particular the next research framework FP7, to support it.

Context

As IST FP7 is near to start at the end of 2006 the European Commission has started consultations in order identify the main research topics, i.e. Grand Challenge, that will shape the next research program. Among the many research domains, information technologies are of first importance as express by Lisbon and i2010 agenda to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010”.

Open Source software takes mainly its legitimacy on what is commonly recognize as “software commoditisation”. Software business is neither based on fees coming from copyright but rather from different kinds of work ecosystem’s members provide.

Because I think Free, libre and open-source software is not always recognize by current european research framework we need a strong commitment with governance rules. I would like to demonstrate that such commitment is relevant for European software industry to renew with leadership and ensure autonomy on strategic domains.

Interoperability and standardisation

Interoperability has been identified as a key issue for European research. According to IDABC European initiative “Interoperability means the ability of information and communication technology (ICT) systems, as well as, of the business processes they support in order to exchange data and enable the sharing of information and knowledge”. Thus, interoperability concern has a lot of common with standardisation since it allows sharing the same language. Technology standards as the expression of a consensus between all industry actors have a key role in fostering healthy and competitive IT ecosystem.

Open source plays a fundamental role in the standardization process, especially in the areas where interoperability is the basis of the economic model. By their nature, open source solutions may act as reference implementations of developing standards. The availability of their source code promotes open and democratic debate around the standard specifications they intent to implement, making them both more robust and interoperable.

Open-source position promotes standards since they are at its business cornerstone; an open-source solution takes all its strength by combination with others open or closed source solutions and has little to gain staying alone, at the contrary of some proprietary solutions.

Available open-source implementation(s) of a standard allows in one hand to validate it thanks to a real test-case and in another hand to enhance its durability since such development process is mainly involved for solution based on strongly established business need. Moreover, availability of an open reference implementation for free increase dissemination and fast standard adoption.

IST project commitment

As far as open-source commitment is recognise as a priority, some governance may be settle in order to express rules that will foster emergence of a rich and consistent open-source ecosystem from European Commission funded projects.

These rules will express main arguments in favour of open-source and define some guidelines on, for example, ways to reuse previous development, licence strategy, etc. Cartography and business readiness of available solutions shall be assessed in order to provide clear view for all stakeholders.

Business opportunity for European SMEs

Open-source business models allow new comers (especially SMEs) to penetrate easily a new market. Small start-up companies can enter the software industry. While proprietary software requires big teams to internally develop and support the product, what matters in open source initiatives is the community size, not the corporate size. Many activities are actually managed by the community, lowering the cost of producing the software, considerably increasing its quality: this leads to great business opportunities to build lean companies, quicker to improve and adapt. There is a lot of start-up born around open source projects.

Moreover, open-source facilitates European IT SMEs to penetrate software market thanks to the mass effect provided by the European IT market with high skilled level.

Innovative factor and new working approach

Because OSS involves heterogeneous groups (i.e. ecosystems) of people working together, it facilitates innovation strategies and induces new innovative business models. Some classification has already been produced (see for example http://www.objectweb.org/wws/d_read/marketing/public/FLT-FederatingEcosystems-June05.pdf).

OSS seems to be a good candidate in order to reach scientific technological breakthroughs and new innovative models.

Scope for my new blog

Welcome for whom who spend some time to read me.
Let's try to define the editing charter for this blog: I will give some insight about my feeling on  technology and approaches I feel more or less comfortable with, I mean principally:

• SOA: Service Oriented Architecture (see OASIS SOA reference model for a good definition: OASIS SOA TC )

• MDA: Model Driven Architecture (see OMG)
• Open-source (see GNU and OSI for relevant definition).

I will also try to give my feeling about Web 2.0 (O'Reillly) and social networking witch are new subjects for me but very interesting and challenging ones.

My page on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jplorre