Eyes Above The Waves

Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Repatriate Kiwi. Hacker.

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.


Comments

Jeff Schiller
"Commercial CORBA implementations typically cost several thousand dollars per development seat, plus, in many cases, runtime royalties for each deployed copy of an application. This limited broader acceptance of the platform—for many potential customers, CORBA was simply too expensive."
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.