QPid is the upstream open source project led by Apache that Red Hat participates heavily in to help develop Red Hat Enterprise MRG and to provide AMQP in Fedora. The initial QPid proposal was submitted by a Red Hat engineer to Apache, and the QPid community has grown significantly since then to include a large set of diverse participants.
Building on the recent announcement that it has joined the AMQP working group, Microsoft has now announced that it will be joining and contributing to the open source QPid project at Apache to build its AMQP implementation. This is also great news for the open source world and a bold new step for Microsoft.
As we previously highlighted, Microsoft adopting the open AMQP standard will enable a new wave of innovation and interoperability—especially between Linux and Windows. Now that Microsoft will be working on development of AMQP software in open source, we expect this to further enhance the interoperability between Linux and Windows—they will not only speak the same protocol but share the same open source code base for that communication, offering an opportunity for Microsoft to build its relationship with the open source community.
The Advantages of Open Source
With Qpid’s new addition, there are several highlights to point out:
- Open source provides a way for active contributors and community members to accelerate significantly the timeline in which vendors like Microsoft can provide an AMQP implementation. By joining an established open source project, these such vendors are able to reap the benefits of all the engineering work that many of the leading messaging developers in the world have already done. Now, these developers in the QPid project will also benefit from Microsoft's contributions.
- There are strategic benefits in joining an open source community. QPid is distributed under an Apache license. So, a vendor could easily just take the QPid code base, fork it for internal use, and then proceed to build its own, proprietary AMQP implementation. By joining the QPid project, Microsoft will not have total control over the direction of the code base beneath its products, and its engineers will have to earn their commit rights and status the same way that other QPid committers have. Still, as companies like Red Hat have shown, building products collaboratively in the open source community leads to more rapid innovation and the opportunity to create better software.
- There is value in the QPid community and implementation. There are multiple open source projects that are implementing AMQP (this is great for making AMQP pervasive). However, that Microsoft is joining QPid indicates that it sees significant value and leadership in QPid. Indeed, QPid is the first open source project to achieve compliance with the latest version of AMQP (0-10). QPid also has support for a wide variety of platforms, including .NET. Indeed, Red Hat engineers have developed a native WCF-compliant .NET client for QPid. Others in the community have contributed an Excel plugin for QPid and are driving the advancement of the QPid broker on Windows.
Red Hat welcomes new members to the QPid open source community to help
expand its technology and continue to create long-term benefits for the project, community and its members. For more information,
see here.
* Note: I have also published this blog at http://press.redhat.com. You can see other MRG blog entries there at http://www.press.redhat.com/category/red-hat-enterprise-mrg/
