Tuesday 20 June 2006
CORBA Post Mortem
I don't usually blog links, but this article on why CORBA failed, while not surprising, is a useful and concise reminder of the perils of development driven by a consortium's consensus specifications.
It's a tricky issue. We need multi-vendor specifications to break down the network effects that encourage monopolization in markets of interoperating software. But we have to avoid falling into the traps of design by committee. There is hope; the Internet itself is an example of the process working successfully, although the fundamentals of the Internet are a lot less complex than what we're trying to do on the Web.
It's a tricky issue. We need multi-vendor specifications to break down the network effects that encourage monopolization in markets of interoperating software. But we have to avoid falling into the traps of design by committee. There is hope; the Internet itself is an example of the process working successfully, although the fundamentals of the Internet are a lot less complex than what we're trying to do on the Web.
Comments
To me, this is the biggest problem with CORBA, getting solid libraries for it is/was expensive. Of course CORBA was invented in a time when free software wasn't as vogue as it is now.