Enterprises Tap Open Source via Eclipse

Germany's Deutsche Post contributed code that got the Swordfish project going, Milinkovich said. The goal of the Swordfish project is to provide an extensible SOA (service-oriented architecture) framework that can be complemented by additional open-source or commercial components such as a service registry, a messaging system or a BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) engine to form a comprehensive open-source SOA run-time environment based on both established and emerging open standards, the Eclipse Web page describing the project said.

Boeing contributed code that got the OSEE (Open System Engineering Environment) project going. According to its Eclipse Web page, "OSEE provides a tightly integrated environment that supports lean engineering. It is integrated around a simple, user-definable data model to eloquently provide bidirectional traceability across the full product life cycle including: architecture and design, requirements management, implementation, verification, and validation."

Kauthing Bank contributed code that got the Open Financial Market Platform project going. According to its Eclipse Web page, "The Open Financial Market Platform … project's goal is to build an extensible, component-based Financial Market Platform based on industry business requirements and state of the art technologies."

And, for its part, Cisco Systems contributed code to get the Eclipse Tigerstripe project started. According to Eclipse, "Tigerstripe is a framework for Model Driven Engineering … with special support for the telecommunications industry."

All of these are Eclipse projects and all but Swordfish were built directly on top of or using Eclipse technology. However, Swordfish is being reworked so that it uses the Eclipse Equinox OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) packages, Milinkovich said.

Milinkovich said he expects more and more enterprises to begin to take part, particularly as they begin to adopt more open-source software into their IT organizations. "We saw it first with the ISVs, and now enterprises are going through this same scenario, except that [they're] about five to 10 years behind the ISVs," he said.

Meanwhile, the Eclipse Foundation recently tweaked its membership rules to enable end-user organizations to join the group. Yet, of the four examples listed, Cisco is the only one that is a member of the Eclipse Foundation. And the company became a member several months after contributing the OSEE code, Milinkovich said. He said he had no indication as to whether or when more enterprises might join Eclipse.