Benefits of an Open Source SOA solution

Stumbled upon an interesting article on the benefits of an Open Source SOA solution, and I cant agree more with it. It lists 5 advantages of using Open Source to leverage SOA needs. They are,

• Try before you buy
• Lower cost of entry
• Cost effective support
• Core competency
• For the people by the people
  

Let me elaborate on point 4 above (Core competency) with respect to WSO2. At WSO2 we've build a complete SOA platform from scratch. The core components we use was designed with SOA in mind. They were not mere afterthoughts.

The article also mentions WSO2 as a major open source stack provider. And its a pretty impressive stack at that, at WSO2 the whole SOA stack we have is open source. Products of this stack include the Fastest Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) in the form of the WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), the award winning WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSAS a runtime for hosting services), the WSO2 Registry, the WSO2 Mashup Server (which helps you compose services using JavaScript with the E4X extension). In addition to this it also provides frameworks such as WSF/Spring, WSF/C and WSF C++ which help build/invoke services. It has also extended its frameworks to the various scripting languages in the form of WSF/PHP, WSF/Ruby, WSF/Python and WSF/Perl. All these frameworks help you build/invoke enterprise grade services which may have WS-Security, WS-Reliable Messaging, WS-Addressing etc...

WSO2 has been around for around 3 years and thats a pretty impressive product portfolio for a company that young.