Best of the blogs: Big, small, nascent, niche, and stack players, SOA has them all, David Linthcium points out in this Real World SOA post. Some are good, others are not. “The funny thing is that all of the vendors that read this blog, and there are about 100 at last count, will think that they are in the ‘good’ column. Unfortunately, a good number are not.” Open source: Taking the debate about what makes an open source company one step forward, Neil McAllister poses another question: Are you an open source user or joiner? “Joiners are the companies that offer financial backing, customer support, and indemnification for open-source projects. They contribute code,” McAllister explains. Take Red Hat, for instance. Joiners, on the other hand, neither hire open source developers, nor contribute much in the way of code or expertise. “That’s hardly the ideal model of community participation. But that’s OK, too, because users often have something else: money.”Storage: With the new StorStac, Intransa is aiming to differentiate itself in an already crowded IP storage fray. To do so, the company is taking a particular focus on bandwidth-intensive environments, such as video-on-demand and video surveillance, reports Mario Apicella in Betting on top storage speed. It’s too early to make predictions about Intransa’s future, “but it will be a good fight to watch and an interesting technology to follow.” Technology Industry