Intalio: the Open Source BPMS Leader?
April 3rd, 2008 by Alex Neihaus
Try as I might, I can’t find a single line of source code in the download of Intalio’s Community Edition ”open source BPMS.” Imagine my surprise at this considering they have been claiming open source leadership for years. They even call themselves “the leading Open Source BPMS company.” Sure, you can find source code for individual piece parts if you go to another website and find it as part of Intalio’s donations to open source projects, but here I am talking about their claims of open source leadership in regards to their Community Edition product.
Because of the complexity of enterprise software, I believe software companies have to hold themselves to a higher level of “truth in labelling.” We don’t like it when toothpaste has antifreeze in it. And I don’t like it when an purportedly open source product has no source and licensing restrictions that sound like they were written in Redmond or Walldorf.
It may be simplistic but calling something “open source” means you get source code. While Sandy Kemsley finds it amusing when I quote Wikipedia, the simple fact is that Wikipedia’s definition of FOSS says open source allows users to “…study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code” (emphasis mine). To call yourself the “open source leader” and to launch an “open source service” (whatever that is) means you should conform to the conventional definition of what FOSS is. And that ain’t what Intalio is doing, near as I can tell.
I was recently fact-checking an upcoming analyst report on BPMS in which the author mentioned in passing that Intalio didn’t actually include source in its Community Edition downloads. I was dumbfounded (and more than a little miffed that these analysts could so blithely give these guys a pass on so fundamental a point).
Incredulous, I asked our product management people to take a look. As willing as I am to call Intalio out for misleading users about its Community Edition, I am still not willing to cut and paste the heated analysis I got back from the product managers. So, let me try to summarize:
- As far as we can tell, the license included with their product includes the restriction that users may not “…decompile, disassemble, or otherwise reverse engineer or attempt to reconstruct or discover any source code or underlying ideas or algorithms of the Intalio Software by any means whatsoever…” (again, emphasis mine)
- As far back as 2006, Intalio was happy allow confusion between “open source-like” and real open source in its licensing to morph into “open source leadership.” (Here, you have to knock Gartner for not being more consistent and giving Intalio the room to claim open source street cred undeservedly.)
- At the end of the day, Intalio’s claim of an open source mantle isn’t about standards or FOSS, it’s about its sales model.
It’s that last point that I really object to. It’s OK to be proprietary. It’s OK not to ship the source code. What’s not OK is to use the terminology of standards and open source to confuse users for the (very legitimate) purpose of driving sales. That’s just misleading.
April 3rd, 2008 at 3:19 pm
Alex,
100% of the code that goes into the runtime components of Intalio|BPMS Community Edition is licensed under the Apache Public License. These are essentially the Apache ODE BPEL engine and the Tempo Workflow framework, plus a lot of existing open source components, such as Apache Tomcat and the Orbeon XForms engine. I doubt that anyone interested in modifying the code of Intalio|BPMS Community Edition would have any difficulty putting these pieces together. Nevertheless, we’d be happy to create a build for you if you want.
Best regards
Ismael Ghalimi, CEO
Intalio, Inc.
April 4th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Ismael,
The fact that you can get source somewhere else is irrelevant, and I think you know it. It’s not so much the availability of source that we take issue with, it’s the head-fake you are giving potential customers about being "open source" for your core product, which you clearly are not.
At a strategic marketing level, you have apparently decided that being associated with open source is desirable. So, you’ve inappropriately co-opted open source branding for your product based on your own, unique, non-standard definition. It’s a lot like wearing leather to an environmental rally you drove to in a Hummer. Apparently, you hope that once you mix in with the crowd, they might not notice what you arrived in and they’ll accept your bona fides.
After I wrote this post, I was flooded with input from others who have also taken issue with the fact that you label your proprietary system as "open source." Your company has used essentially the same defense to my post here and has been dinged as far back as 2006 for what that blogger describes as "cheap insinuations" of being open source.
I can only surmise this 1984-like doublespeak is, and has been, deliberate. Your web site continues to misquote Gartner, claiming you are the only "first and only credible Open Source BPMS" when in fact, the very link you quote as a source labels you, at best, "open-source-like." It’s amazing to me that the authors of this report haven’t called you out for misusing it for so long.
I do admire the chutzpah it takes to call black white.
May 15th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
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