Now that I've given you my disclaimers, look at Axis. Axis was the SOAP reference implementation, a very important stack, given to the open-source community at Apache. A year ago, [I thought], it's Apache, it's [from] IBM, it's safe. Let me go there, let me adopt Axis, and we have based some of our work on Axis. In that respect, that decision was made just like any other end-user IT organization would make that decision. We said it's safe, let's go. Then what happened is the project took off, people started contributing, IBM contributed a lot and when it was stable and almost a product, then IBM forked back into IBM Corp. a proprietary version, which is allowed by the BSD-style license that the Apache Software Foundation has. That led me, my guys, our group, and all the other users that contributed to Axis in a void.
CRN: But wasn't the code IBM worked on already part of the open-source community? Couldn't you use that?
Fleury: There is a branch that is still open source and is still the Axis branch, but essentially, all the development is gone because IBM was the biggest one, and they have gone back proprietary. [So IBM said], "Thank you, our corporate decision says that it's more advantageous to us to take it back to us proprietary, see you." Then there's no commitment [to open source].
That is very disturbing to me because all of a sudden what I thought was a safe bet as a user of that technology, not even as a developer, is gone. And now I'm scrambling to save that, and how do we do it, and maybe we start committing ourselves to Apache. I can't imagine how the developers that committed to that project feel about this because all of a sudden that product roadmap for that project disappears because the biggest committer to that project has gone back into the proprietary world.
CRN: Eventually, SOAP as a standard did go back out to the community, though.
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