Hi there,
I threw out the idea because we are developing it for one of our beta
testers and thought it would be useful for ESME, but never thought it
would have many legal implications, sorry about that ...
Since our beta tester is a big company that uses SAP and have a lot of
developers in staff, I'm assuming they have ways to extract the data
and store it in a data warehouse, and from there it goes to the
widget. Or maybe they also use Business Objects BI products that come
with API and allow you to extract massaged data from it, I'm not
sure ...
With that being said, I like Markus' idea of abstract interfaces,
which I envision it this way: we build widgets that resemble an RSS
reader. Take for example the sales order widget that shows orders for
today, by salesperson. We would build a widget that shows the figures
and its only requirement would be to read the sales order data from an
RSS feed that could be something like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<sales_orders_today>
<salesperson>
<id>JR</id>
<orders>5</orders>
</salesperson>
<salesperson>
<id>AC</id>
<orders>2</orders>
</salesperson>
</sales_orders_today >
So users / collaborators would have to build this connector (RSS feed
that connects portions of the ERP data to the widget). Then these
connectors would be released under a different license (or be written
in-house) like Markus mentioned.
I'm not very familiar with SAP legalities, my background is from mid-
market ERP (Mas500, Navision, etc) and they all come with ODBC or
other kind of connectors for their data. I have installed into a lot
of third-party products (dashboards, reports, etc) that at the end of
the day do the same thing as we're trying to accomplish: read portions
of ERP data, massage and present it in a more readable way... but
again maybe SAP is more protective of their data?
Just thinking out loud... hope it helps...
Thanks,
Marcelo
Head Developer
Akibot
On Dec 6, 2009, at 7:27 AM, Markus Kohler wrote:
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your post here!
a few comments from my side.
I think the issue is that the term "usesEnterprise Service" is not
clearly
defined.
Actually someone could build a piece of code that wouldn't really
use any
code of SAP and not even the wsdl's. Would that be a "use" of
Enterprise
Services? I guess SAP would argue that in order to do so you had
access to
the wsdl at some point in time or you did reverse engineering, which
I guess
is not permitted either.
But since "almost every problem in computer science can be solved by
another
level of indirection", One could build a generic adapter that would
not be
released under the Apache license( or any other open source license)
and
release it on Source Exchange. But even then it would not be 100%
clear
whether an adapter that is exposing Enterprise services would be
legal.
Exposing an enterprise service 1:1 would probably not be legal, but
exposing
only portions of it in more abstract way could be legal (and useful),
wouldn't it?
At the end I think ESME could just implement against abstract
interfaces.
Those abstract interfaces could be implemented by adapters for the
various
ERP vendors and this code would not have to be licensed under the
Apache
license.
Regards,
Markus
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- Alan Kay
