06.27.05
Food Fight
Last fall, we groused aloud about the myth of open systems. Although it once meant something, the term “open” has become so overused as to become practically meaningless. Every vendor wants to make their technology accessible, but not to the point where their core intellectual property becomes fungible.
The latest showdown over Java Business Integration, or JBI for short, reminds us once more that no vendor wants to be known as the Anakin Skywalker of open. And on the tenth anniversary of Java, that’s exactly where we find IBM.
Since its near death experience, IBM has shaken loose their proprietary legacy by getting on the right side of history on “open” initiatives: pointedly Java, web services, and Linux. It stemmed from the now-vindicated proposition that open standards buttressed, rather than threatened, legacy assets. Showing its maturity, IBM cried all the way to the bank as it chafed under Sun’s stewardship of the Java Community Process (JCP), thanks to its WebSphere and services business goldmine.
The emergence of web services standards, which made possible a new era of services- oriented architectures, provided IBM the long-awaited work-around to the JCP. Forming an alliance of convenience with Microsoft, both became the critical mass driving adoption of key web services standards through various Oasis technical committees. While Microsoft over the past year kissed and made up with Sun, to date its new relationship has yet to impact web services standards making.
But every once in a while, that pesky JCP process manages to come up with something useful. Barely a couple weeks back (June 7 to be exact), the JCP voted 14 yeah to 2 abstentions (IBM and BEA) to ratify Java Business Integration (JBI). In effect, a Java landslide minus Java’s two largest players.
JBI is the Java world’s specification for an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), a more federated, network-based alternative that assumes many of the functions of appservers in a services-oriented world. Sun claims that JBI could do for ESBs what J2EE did for appservers: create the standard that creates the market. Yet ironically, JBI is hardly about Java at all.
Unfortunately, IBM has been pretty mum so far about its JBI abstention. The obvious question is whether its abstention places IBM on the wrong side of history.
Admittedly, IBM has been quite vocal up till now that ESB is not a product. Rivals on the JCP accuse IBM of bad faith, because the notion of clarifying the ambiguity surrounding ESBs threatens IBM’s service business. Hogwash. As we learned with J2EE, standards may clarify and create opportunity for solutions, but they didn’t steamroller complexity or dispense with the need for systems integration.
Maybe we’re naïve, but we think IBM could come up with a far better response. Swallow your pride, pat the JCP on the back, then get the community to take the darned thing to Oasis (where Microsoft can get involved) because that’s where it belongs.