Cisco To Open-Source New Messaging Protocol

Esther Schindler writes "Do you use SOAP, CORBA or EJBs? You might want to take a look at Etch, writes James Turner for CIO.com. It's language-, platform- and transport-agnostic, and Cisco is planning to release it as open source. Certainly, it offers some technical benefits: 'In addition to a simplified configuration, Etch also promises less overhead over the wire, compared to SOAP. In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip, company officials stated.' And the open source part? Cisco is in the process of deciding what license to use. 'The intent is to use a less restrictive license than GPL, perhaps Apache or Mozilla. This is to allow commercial developers to incorporate Etch into products without licensing issues. A final announcement on the licensing decision will be available in the next month.'"

I'm 2 n00b

Someone please add the tag 'suddenoutbreakofcommonsense' to cover the licensing decision.

Re:

I'm not fluent in the language, but there has to be a word in Yiddish for just this.

GPL

Glad to see more and more companies moving away from GPL, understanding that it will only limit the potential adoption. As a highly respected registered member of the Slashdot community, I'm posting as AC as this post will very likely be modded troll.

Re:GPL

You care too much about your karma - regardless of if your post is being sarcastic or not - say what you mean and mean what you say, stand behind it because we won't believe an AC anyways.

Re:GPL

Sorry to feed the troll, but the point of the GPL is not to increase adoption. Your absolutely right to say that other licenses will lead to greater adoption- but this is adoption by people who may take, take, take and not give back.
Besides, it sounds like LGPL is what's needed in this case, anyhow.

Re:GPL

Sorry to feed the troll, but the point of the GPL is not to increase adoption. Your absolutely right to say that other licenses will lead to greater adoption- but this is adoption by people who may take, take, take and not give back.

The company I work for sells closed source software. We also use some open source software (not GPL) in the product.

We contribute back to the open source we use because it's more sensible. Adding the same features back in again and again would be counterproductive. We'd rather they get added to the open source project permanently.

We have a blanket ban on using GPL'd source, though. We can't afford to GPL our entire 20 million line software stack, which would be the result of using even a tiny bit of GPL code.

Try to understand that not everyone loves the GPL and not everyone that doesn't love the GPL is a troll.

Now it's my turn to get modded into oblivion for not being fond of the GPL. Sigh.

Re:

We contribute back to the open source we use because it's more sensible.

Well, the positive side is that you're contributing something. But I'd rather say that as "We contribute back to the open source we use only when it's more sensible". That means trivial fixes, basic features and other things that doesn't threaten your business and is cheaper to "outsource" the maintenance on. Any time it's major features, more specific layers to the business you're in that could make it easier to produce a software stack like yours, most decide to pile it up on their 20 MLOC proprietary pi

Re:GPL

I've never met a GPL code developer who released his code under GPL because he was forced.

I support GPL because I believe if something is important it should be codified and that if you develop something for the community you should protect it for the community. But that doesn't mean that releasing something under an FOSS license without a "recontribute/openness" clause doesn't mean that there won't be active community development. Something built on and from sharing will always foster more sharing, it's an issue of principal.

Imagination

More and more companies moving away from GPL? That's a strange conclusion, considering that it's probably had the fastest growing mindshare an uptake of any software license, ever, and that GPLv3 is proving very popular already with new projects and migrations.

There's absolutely no ethical reason to choose a less restrictive license over the GPL. The only thing the GPL restricts is the ability to restrict others. THAT is possibly a reason to avoid it, since, for example, I would like to prevent military

Re:Imagination

There's absolutely no ethical reason to choose a less restrictive license over the GPL.

That depends on who you ask.

The only thing the GPL restricts is the ability to restrict others.

Funny thing is, it isn't possible anyway to "restrict others" in that fashion without their cooperation (buying/downloading your software). It restricts the choices available to the end user by causing certain products to not exist.

ZeroC's ICE

It'll be interesting to compare Etch to ICE [zeroc.com], which is a GPL'd open-source, cross-language RPC toolkit (you can buy commerical licenses too). It's quite widely used by banks and is generally reckoned to be speedy.

He wrote this article on his PDA

looking at the width
of the column in the
article, and cio.com
wonders why nobody
visits their site
and so they have to
pimp their ad-laden
site on Slashdot in
a sure sign of des-
peration. Click next
to continue.

Um, what?

How does one "open source" a protocol? There's no source to open, just a specification.

*reads article*

Ah, it's actually a set of libraries that use a new protocol.

Re:Um, what?

You open-source a protocol by providing a specification with no attached IP rights, such as patents covering the protocol. A reference implementation kind of helps, too.

Re:Um, what?

Wouldn't that be "open spec" instead of "open source", with the open source reference implementation being a separate issue?

CORBA was shit. SOAP not much better.

All of these distributed technologies have been shit. CORBA was absolutely hell to develop with. Besides the runtime performance problems, development was always a huge hassle. It rarely just worked. J

Java's RMI was slightly better. But again, the development overhead was huge. Generating proxy and stub classes becomes a chore really quickly, and debugging becomes a real challenge.

SOAP was a little bit better than CORBA and Java RMI. At least writing the object layer code is a far more reasonable task. The performance, though, was complete shit compared to Java RMI and Corba. Whatever development time you saved initially in writing the SOAP interfacing code was instead spent trying to optimize what you had so that it wouldn't perform so fucking horribly.

In some ways, I hope that Cisco can do better. But I really don't know if that's possible. It may just be the nature of the beast that these sort of technologies perform poorly, are slow to develop, and are often nothing more than a huge hassle.

Cisco, Please use the LGPLv3 license.

Releasing the implementation library under a LGPL license will still allow for the functionality to be incorporated ( via dynamic linking ) into any proprietary product. The LGPL will insure the availability of the source code and downstream legal reuse rights of Cisco's implementation to downstream recipients.

The LGPL is the only license that will insure that at least that Cisco's implementation of the protocol can not be easily extended in an inoperative manner.

Given the timespan that Cisco expects the protocol to be in use, version 3 of the LGPL is the best option.

Re:Cisco, Please use the LGPLv3 license.

Sod the libraries, license them however you wish - give us full and unfettered access to the specifications so those of us that wish to produce a BSD licensed or Public Domain set of libraries can do so. Don't assume that any license you choose for the libraries today will be good enough for everyone tomorrow.

Re:

So? That's called 'Freedom'. I'd rather have too much of it than too little.

Re:

"Here's the spec, do whatever you want with it, but you can only use our name for it if you pass this huge test suite."

Re:

A test suite wouldn't have helped. Win2k worked just fine with normal kerberos as a client and as a server [microsoft.com]. The problem was that if you wanted to deal with domain based groups you needed an extension, something that MSFT wasn't intrested in letting people have for free.

Ice?

Other than license, how does this compare to ZeroCs Iceï¼Y Does anybody know? I've played with Ice before and it's very well done, although I remain to be convinced of the value of remote object references in a distributed system.

Re:

Might be, but you are totally off-topic here. This article is about doing this [wikipedia.org] ober network, which has nothing to do with Instant Messaging, save for the fact that some information transfer is involved. IIRC, there are things like XEP-0072, that allow for application data messaging over XMPP, but these are also not exactly of interest to most Jabber users, and if they require server extensions, well, you'll be out of luck with using "popular services" }the public ones?] to transfer such data.

Re:Distributed computing.

Both those protocols suffer from 1 problem: bloat. The reason they're bloated and inefficient is because a committee decided how and what to add to the protocol once it was initiated, and we all know how well that works out.

SOAP was a 'quick and dirty solution (by Don Box IIRC) to (apart from getting a job at MS :) ) transfer COM calls over a http tunnel instead of the usual DCE-RPC tunnel, and it worked well when you only wanted to send a request to an object. Obviously, it has to have a webserver on the other end which slows it down tremendously, and then they added support for all kinds of complex types and a large schema as well. I'm surprised it works at all after seeing the raw WSDL code!

CORBA... designed by committee to do everything including transport kitchen sinks.

Since I've been working in the industry there is a tendency for supposedly bright people to take something simple and 'make it a general purpose solution' or 'implement some framework features' which nearly always breaks it into a bloated POS far removed from the original, simple, easy to use, and effective solution.

I welcome Cisco's new protocol, I don't care if it doesn't do everything I might possibly ever want to do, as long as it does the majority of my work quickly and simply. I can work around the edge cases myself, possibly even (gosh!) redesigning the way those edge cases work.

Re:This is an improvement?

Most people just don't RTFA, but you skipped a percentage of the words in the summary too !
"In a testbed environment where SOAP was managing around 900 calls a second, Etch generated more than 50,000 messages in a one-way mode, and 15,000 transactions with a full round-trip"

Flaming the GP isn't correct in this case, the summary is ambiguous. There is a difference between managing calls and generating messages, as a single call can generate multiple messages.

A correct summary would have been to compare the amount of calls a second both SOAP and Etch can handle, or the amount of messages/transactions required for a fixed number of calls. But I think the PR-drone that wrote up the article did so knowingly to put SOAP in a bad light.

Or are you simply being sarcastic? If so: WOOOOOSH!