Red Hat has announced it has joined the Interoperability Vendor Alliance, an organisation created originally by Microsoft to improve interoperability with non-Microsoft products (is interoperability between Microsoft products ever a problem?) JBoss, now a division of Red Hat, originally partnered with Microsoft back in 2005 and one of the areas of effort was around interoperability. Therefore, this move by Red Hat can be seen as a logical extension of that effort. As the recent announcement states:
Red Hat’s membership in the alliance builds on the interoperability work started by the JBoss Division 18 months ago to optimize JBoss Enterprise Middleware on the Windows platform. To date, those efforts have been primarily in the Web Services arena, including the critically important World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) WS-Addressing specification and several plugfests around WS-Security, WS-Transactions, and WS-Addressing. In addition, Microsoft completed Hibernate certification for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Java Database Connectivity (JDBC) driver. Now, Red Hat can extend and deepen interoperability beyond standards to the native level on Windows for its JBoss Enterprise Middleware.
Shaun Connolly, VP of Product Management at JBoss/Red Hat had the following to say about the announcement:
"Through the alliance, we will work with industry vendors to ensure that the Red Hat customer experience is transparent and seamless in spite of heterogeneous environments."
At present it is unknown whether this interoperability will extend beyond their middleware division, or precisely what areas of interoperability will be investigated. However, the announcement has had mixed responses in the community. As Matt Asay says:
The strange thing in this announcement, and in the existence of the VIA, is that we have to talk about interoperability at all. It is precisely because the system is broken - with intellectual property rights driving vendors apart, rather than together - that something like this VIA is even remotely interesting.
Microsoft are happy:
Great news today: the alliance is growing by leaps and bounds. Red Hat officially announced their participation.
Some are confused at the need for yet another organization in this space, whereas others see this as a generally positive move.
Web Services are one venue for interoperability, and one which is seeing a lot of positive movement. However, not everything can be addressed with SOAP/HTTP. Although not necessarily something that will improve your life appreciably in the next few months, hopefully the Interop Vendor Alliance will solve more problems than it creates.