Not to add to Marcelo's embarrassment, but just to make sure that it's clear that there is no hidden agenda: I have had no involvement with Akibot prior to engaging on the ESME dev list. In my opinion, unless a company has any fantasies about upstaging Twitter, working on an open source ecosystem for microblogging is the best chance of success.
Other than being involved in SAP Developer Network, I have no say in SAP's strategy regarding integration of microblogging solutions, and I'm at best an influencer with good technology background and of course experience in the open source world. From my vantage point, if a company like SAP would be seriously interested in partnerships with proprietary software companies that offer microblogging solutions, the names of these companies would likely begin with a T, G or F. I don't think an A is among that just yet ... Seriously, even I as a very skeptical person who lived through dot-bomb times not trusting any of the great business plans (unfortunately ...) am thinking that social networks are not a fad that will just disappear. Just as Apache's httpd was the foundation for Web 1.0, there needs to be something like a ubiquitous infrastructure for Web 2.0. Perhaps that's what ESME may become. So, I think it would be a wise move for smaller software companies to get involved in ESME to build that Web 2.0 social networking ecosystem as opposed to dreaming up a scenario where they would become the next Twitter. I'm glad that we all here seem to agree that the Apache license is a good license for enabling such ecosystems, with plenty of opportunities for commercial software companies to innovate. However, at the heart of such an ecosystem must be a well-architectured enabling technology that is free of any IP encumbrances. Despite the fact that I don't agree with David on some of his comments, I certainly do agree with him that core ESME must be squeaky-clean from an IP-perspective. My 2 cents, and my opinions of course are not necessarily SAP's opinions. -Michael -----Original Message----- From: Marcelo Pham [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, Dec 06, 2009 2:22 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: SAP Services in ESME (was: UI widgets for ESME) Look what we've created!! http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02269.html Discussion is heating up. At the end of the day, without that intention in mind, with the widgets I brought up an extremely important point: an open source Twitter clone for the enterprise (that claims to be business-process oriented), without reading any data from the enterprise, is almost pointless... they didn't have any discussion about this before because they are not even close yet, so this discussion is very important for ESME's direction ... maybe in some way we are killing ESME (hahahahahaha - enter Akibot's front end !!!!!) Michael Bechauf is the VP of the SAP Developer Network, he's based in San Francisco... David is the Apache guy, very pragmatic on open source... Maybe we should give Michael a call some day, get introduced, see what he thinks, ask him about Akibot, start out the conversation ... we can contact him without bugging Arlen and save him for bigger/better issues. What do you think? we'll discuss it this week
