Terracotta Goes Open Source

The company opts to open-source its Java clustering technology.

Terracotta on Dec. 4 announced plans to open-source its Java clustering technology to accelerate adoption by developers using open-source frameworks.

Ari Zilka, founder and chief technology officer at San Francisco-based Terracotta, said the company will provide open-source products free of charge, while offering professional support under a commercial subscription. Terracottas drop-in clustering solution enables developers to give applications high availability without requiring any rewriting of applications, Zilka said.

"Terracotta seeks to deliver what we hope will become the embedded standard in clustering with our open- source offering," Zilka said.

The companys move to open source is backed by support from developers, partners and key OSS (open- source software) community members, including principal contributors to the Spring, Tomcat and Geronimo projects, Zilka said.

Terracotta has established a project steering committee featuring influential members from the Java OSS community, including Rod Johnson, chief executive of Interface21 and founder of the Spring framework project, and Jim Jagielski, CTO at Covalent and founder, developer and director of the Apache Software Foundation. Others who have agreed to help include Adrian Colyer, Spring contributor and CTO at Interface21; Filip Hanik, a committer on Apache Tomcat and key contributor for Apache Tribes; and Jeff Genender, CTO and chief architect of Savoir Technologies and active committer for Apache Geronimo.

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"Terracotta has very powerful clustering technology, and I am excited about their open sourcing, as I can clearly see the value to the community," said Hanik, in San Francisco, in a statement.

John Wegis, CTO at Ziff Davis Medias Game Group, also in San Francisco, said, "Ziff Davis Media chose Terracottas clustering technology to improve the performance of our Web-based gaming portal 1UP.com. It is a very nice addition to our existing open-source technology stack, and we are excited about being able to extend the clustering functionality in-house."

 

"The use of Java and open source is pervasive in financial services," said David Campbell, vice president of Goldman Sachs Principal Investment Area, also in San Francisco, in a statement. "Terracotta is now aligned with key open-source frameworks to become part of the new enterprise Java stack for production applications."

Meanwhile, Cameron Purdy, president of Tangosol, in Somerville, Mass., said, "Building a software business in the age of open-source software is extremely difficult unless you can show compelling value. For a highly technical solution such as Terracotta, the open-source model allows them to more readily communicate the necessary steps for integrating their software to potential customers, with the promise of a support revenue stream. I think that moving their product into open source is a wise move for Terracotta and wish them luck in their endeavor."

Tangosol, which provides data grid infrastructure software to enable businesses to predictably scale applications, announced its own arrangement with Interface21 and Johnson on Dec. 4.

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