OpenMama and AMQP: Open Collaboration in Action

Two weeks ago, The Linux Foundation announced a new Labs project — OpenMama. This project was the result of a relationship forged with NYSE Technologies years ago at our Enterprise End User Summit held in New York every year. 

OpenMama provides a high performance middleware agnostic messaging API that interfaces with message-oriented middleware systems. While this project isn’t a core piece of “Linux,” we feel it has the potential to cement Linux rising position as the defacto OS for markets that need to process huge amounts of data (such as financial, high performance computing, web services, telco, logistics and more). This is all about doing open development for an important technical sector, while enhancing the relationships and networking between this project’s users and developers with core Linux developers and other members of the Linux Foundation. It — like most technology — is both about the soft science of relationships as well as the bits and bytes.

And it’s already working. Just a few days after the launch, I saw this message on the OpenMama mailing list from Raphael Cohn from StormMQ:

“OpenMAMA looks like it’s got the potential to solve a substantial hole in messaging. In particular, it makes a superb way to write portable C applications that use MQ. We’ve been looking at the documentation and source, and are interested in working with the OpenMAMA community to develop an AMQP 1-0 bridge.

We currently have an active open source project for a C client for AMQP 1-0, libamqp (https://github.com/libamqp) It looks like it would be quite possible to integrate this into OpenMAMA.”

AMQP is a financial messaging system wire protocol that many people erroneously assumed competed with OpenMama. This collaboration is important work that will make Linux an even more attractive choice. It also shows the non-zero-sum nature of open source. If you open it, they will come and collaborate with you to benefit all parties. Based on the response to Raphael from Michael Schonberg, a maintainer of OpenMama, it looks as if the collaboration in this burgeoning community is going to yield positive results.

Getting companies like StormMQ as well as the members of OpenMama (Bank of America Merrill Lynch, EMC, Exegy, Fixnetix, J.P. Morgan) involved in Linux Foundation events, networking and knowledge exchange will also ensure the Linux continues to advance in these market segments. This bridge is open development in action, and I’m pleased we could provide the neutral framework to make it happen.