Yesterday I met with Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder and VP of Technology for WSO2 to discuss their current product set. Paul has been around this industry for some time, putting in a nine year stint at IBM, where he lead the WebSphere WebServices Gateway team development team. He's also donated EJB code to the Apache SOAP project long ago. So, as you might imagine, our conversation turned to the ongoing open source Yesterday I met with Paul Fremantle, Co-Founder and VP of Technology for WSO2 to discuss their current product set. Paul has been around this industry for some time, putting in a nine year stint at IBM, where he lead the WebSphere WebServices Gateway team development team. He’s also donated EJB code to the Apache SOAP project long ago. So, as you might imagine, our conversation turned to the ongoing open source debate over licensing schemes.Right now, there seems to be a great deal of fuss over whether or not open source can “play” in the enterprise owing to issues like GPL 2 vs GPL 3, designer licenses and the spectre of indemnification. So it was refreshing to hear Paul discuss his stance on the importance of the license behind the code. Here’s what I could jot down as we talked (any errors are mine, of course). It’s about trust. WSO2 expects their customers to trust them to be the best company to rely on in this space. We’ll see how the whole open source licensing issue pans out, but my view is that the licensing is not the important part of the business decision to work with a company. When I was with IBM it wasn’t the license that drove customers. It wasn’t the IP. J2EE really showed us that. It doesn’t matter what IP you have, if you have a J2EE server, because there are many functionally identically servers out there. What matters is this: is it a good company to partner with. Can I rely upon that company as an infrastructure provider. BTW, WSO2 uses the easy going Apache license, which is obviously in line with Paul’s stance. Open Source