Announcing IBM WebSphere Application Server Community Edition
This is an important announcement (along along with others) as it furthers the committment of big companies to open source products with support. Linux is mainstream with support from Novell, Red Hat, IBM, etc., but in an enterprise with a small IT staff, it’s difficult to build your business on software that’s free of commercial support. Having the source code is a big plus, but most of the guys holding the IT organization together don’t have time to dig through source to explain to the business side why a retail store or warehouse system is down.
The real question now is why does IBM provide so many application server options? It’s confusing.