Carbon is out .. come and get it!

So ... after many many months of really hard work, we just released:

• WSO2 Web Services Application Server v3.0
  
  
• WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus v2.0
  
• WSO2 Registry v2.0
  
  
• WSO2 Business Process Server v1.0
  
  

All of these are based on WSO2 Carbon, the componentized, OSGi-powered SOA framework we created.

If you want to know more about what we're trying to do with Carbon then check out Paul's awesome blog on the subject. If you want to know how we managed to pull off such a mammoth release then check out Samisa's blog. If you want to understand different aspects of Carbon then keep an eye on stuff that mentions WSO2 Carbon - many of our folks will start blogging and writing articles about it soon .. Ruwan has already started on the ESB!

Or better yet, just download the code and let us know what you think. Yes, as always, all of our products are no-gimmicks, 100% open source under Apache License 2.0.

Before I end this blog entry, I have to say how proud I am of the wonderful team of 60+ people we have in WSO2. Its been a very hard few months wrapping up 4 major product releases all at once while still serving our large paying customer base, supporting our even larger free user community and also continuing to develop and release our 10 other products. Yeah its been a tough time. But you know what, when the going gets tough, the tough get going .. and we proved that we have a tough team. Its been a privilege to be part of this phase of WSO2 and I know this is just the stepping stone to where we know we can go.

Awesome job guys!

Jonathan's interview @ Mashup Camp

Jonathan was at the Mashup Camp a bit ago and was interviewed by TechWeb TV. Take a look; great way to understand how we think about the WSO2 Mashup Server!

MuleSource giving up on open source?

In April MuleSource announced that they were splitting the Mule ESB into a community edition and an enterprise edition.

Apparently the enterprise edition also has features that are available only in that version, plus the only version customers can buy support for is the enterprise edition. It also appears that the license requires you to uninstall the enterprise edition if you ever stop paying for it .. and rumor has it that the software will actually stop working if you don't continue to pay for it. Wow. WOW.

I guess what this is saying is that MuleSource is having trouble monetizing the more than million downloads they claim.

However, I'm surprised, no, shocked. Larry Augustin (who happens to be an advisor to MuleSource and also WSO2) gave a very interesting talk at the last OSBC about how to make it less difficult for customers to pay. One of his main points was about avoiding a rip-n-replace approach when getting customers to pay.

Today if you want to try Mule then you go and download their free community edition. But then if you want to buy support for it, then you have to get new bits and switch over! And of course if you ever decide to stop paying, then you have to drop back to the community edition, which has some missing features. Vendor lock-in for sure.

This is the opposite of "make it easy to pay" that Larry was advocating at OSBC.

Forcing people to pay by legal means is the hallmark of proprietary software. Open source vendors need to find a way to deliver sufficient value to customers to make them want to pay .. apparently MuleSource has failed at that and is going back to the license to force people to pay. In other words, giving up on open source.

Summary: If you want a really open source ESB then don't look at Mule any more! Ah yes, we've got one .. and BTW its the fastest around :-).

(Oh yeah, we ran into Mule's non-open source nature head-on when doing the performance analysis .. it turns out that the enterprise edition license does not allow us to publish performance numbers against it! We're familiar with that with BEA AquaLogic etc., but never expected that from Mule. Oh BTW that's a field of use restriction, which violates the Open Source Definition (item #6) .. so really, Mule is effectively no longer available under an OSI approved license and hence not at all open source.)

Reclaiming the ESB

Paul Fremantle has written an article on Reclaiming the ESB .. this is somewhat in response to Steve Vinoski's original writeup against the ESB concept. Gotta read it if you are into this stuff :-).