The Apache Jakarta Project

Tenets: SMALL, 1THING, PROTO, REUSE, sum

Central concept: Open source cooperation leverages the work of many, yielding great benefits.

When one looks at the level of cooperation, the faithful implementation of standards, the honest technical interaction, and the consistently high quality of the software produced by the Apache Jakarta Project,[3] one can only come to one conclusion: open-source development works.

As evidenced by the way the projects are governed, the way the software is written, and the enthusiastic acceptance of its users, Jakarta has clearly put a stake in the ground that causes all proprietary software developers to sit up and take notice.

What has made the project so successful? No one thing, really. It is the sum of all the parts that make it a powerful, cohesive development organization. But if one had to single out a factor that has had more influence than any other, it would be the idea that community is more important than software. In other words, the democratic cooperation of many minds is better than a closed caste system of developers working for a single (usually corporate) entity.

The Jakarta software is freely available to anyone who wants it. Because of the generally recognized high quality of the software, large corporations have been using it to run critical business functions. The side effect of this is that consultants and developers have sprung up to provide customization services to adapt the software for specific industries. This illustrates an important principle: there is still money to be made from free software.

We have seen that the computing industry has ridden several broad waves of opportunity. First, there was the hardware wave, where much money was invested in the development of new CPUs, memory, and storage devices with sufficient power to get us to the next wave. Large companies like IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation made lots of money during that wave. The second wave, the software wave, saw the likes of Lotus, Novell, and Microsoft rise to the top as they capitalized on the need for software and applications to meet the needs of business. The next wave is one of services, where end users are no longer interested in what's under the covers as long as one can get the desired content when one wants it.

Note that the first two waves ended when the bottom dropped out of the price-performance model of the respective wave. The commoditization of PCs has driven the profits out of hardware. Likewise, free software is making it nearly impossible to make money from selling software anymore. The profitability point now resides at the service end of the spectrum. When everyone can get any piece of software or hardware for a negligible cost, then service (largely through customization) becomes the differentiator. As of this writing, this is already occurring with service offerings such as the Red Hat Network and various premium services offered by the media outlets such as CNN and the New York Times. We have moved from the mass production of the Industrial Era to the mass customization of the Information Age.

So keep an eye on what happens to the Apache Jakarta Project. It is a microcosm of what's happening to the best of the open-source development community at large.

[3]http://jakarta.apache.org.



Linux and the Unix Philosophy
Linux and the Unix Philosophy
ISBN: 1555582737
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 92
Authors: Mike Gancarz

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