It seems as though as soon as the open source community rallies around a technology, the IT industry starts taking it more seriously - and finds practical application for it. Ironically, although organizations like the concept, despite the maturation of the open source community in a variety of platforms and technologies, adoption of open source products in large organizations is still an uphill battle. The good news is that mainstream vendor products are now based on a combination of open source technologies, and so mature products from the community are finding homes in many corporations.
I have noticed that, in fact, there is a tendency to mix open-source and proprietary products in a SOA implementation. I truly believe that this is the best approach. Let's see an example that Ajit tells in his article: Apache Synapse (read also this preliminar analysis from Gartner)
The idea behind Synapse is intended to address the issue of creating something tangible from the quagmire of standards around Web services. Synapse plans to produce a service broker - lightweight and scalable - based on Web services standards. The broker will be developed with contributions from Infravio, Blue Titan, Iona, Sonic Software, and others. Synapse focuses on the implementation of a pure Web services stack, including WS-Policy, WS-Security, WS-ReliableMessaging, and WS-Addressing. Also, Synapse is targeted to enable SOA adoption by combining with other open source components such as Struts, Axis, Spring, and Hibernate. In essence, Synapse is the equivalent of your open source ESB.
