Celtix needs to be in the mainstream, to be a peer of the large open source projects, Baker said. The key thing is that we need [other large open source projects] to use it. And most of the action right now is at Apache.

We realized that other Apache projects like to integrate, interoperate with and use open source from other Apache projects, said Baker. There is nothing inherently wrong with ObjectWeb, indeed we remain very complimentary about them. But we think Celtix is better understood as part of Apache.

The OW2 Consortium was formed in 2005 after ObjectWeb, which was started in January 2002 by INRIA, Bull, and France Telecom, joined forces with Orientware, which launched in 2004 by Peking University, Beijing University of Aeronautics & Astronautics, National University of Defense Technology, CVIC Software Engineering, and the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Apache Software Foundation was founded in 1999, an evolution and extension of The Apache Group, a group of individuals formed in 1995 to develop the Apache web server.

Baker also sought to explain more clearly the difference between the Celtix ESB, an open source bus that Iona is the driving force behind even if it is hosted now at Apache, and Artix, Iona’s commercial ESB.

He said that rather than Celtix being a stripped-down version of Artix designed merely to turn free Celtix downloaders into Artix users when they realize Celtix’s limitations, he envisages that many of the Celtix faithful will move instead to Celtix Enterprise Support.

The majority of Celtix users, because they are for the most part looking at it for departmental or on a project-by-project basis, will probably move to Celtix Enterprise Support if they want the fully-tested, supported version, said Baker, but there may also be those after more enterprise-wide capabilities who may choose to turn to Artix.

The Celtix Enterprise Support package gives users access to Iona’s technical support center and its 24×7 support for mission-critical projects in production. Celtix Enterprise Support is also said to include immediate response times to critical production issues, a dedicated technical account manager and packaged binary drops on request.

The majority of Iona’s revenue still comes from products that speak to its Corba roots, specifically its Orbix object request broker or ORB. But Baker was adamant that its foray into open source with the donation of much of its Artix code to the open source OW2 Consortium and now Apache are far more than a simple ploy to migrate people from free downloads to its commercial Artix ESB.

We bought [open source vendor] LogicBlaze because we wanted to have that knowledge only an open source vendor and its engineers can give you, he said. We wanted to have some of that open source DNA.

Baker said that LogicBlaze also had a really nice, fast JMS implementation. While Iona had JMS capabilities within both its Orbix and Artix products, LogicBlaze was superior, according to Baker. Indeed, he noted that numerous rival vendors have been relying on LogicBlaze to give their own products JMS capabilities.

Our View

There will always be cynics who feel that commercial vendors that have a foot in the open source camp somehow have less moral authority than the fans, hobbyists, users, developers, aficionados, adherents – call them what you will – in the open source movement who have no obvious commercial axe to grind.

But it cannot be ignored that it is often the commercial vendors that donate large chunks of formerly proprietary code to the open source community and often offer support and resources that help to make open source projects what they are.

Baker is honest about the firm’s intentions. He hopes that this year will be the first in which the company actually generates revenue one way or another from its Celtix initiative. This is, in our view, fair enough. It never pretended it was only doing Celtix for the greater good of the open source movement, and after all, Iona does not profess to be a not-for-profit organization.