This is the seventeenth edition of our weekly BPM 2.0 post. Today, I will try to explain why we need an open source process engine. Beside the fact that an Open Source license provides the best insurance policy a customer of enterprise software can get, the Open Source development process brings many benefits that are particularly relevant to a process engine.

First, it takes very significant resources to develop any piece of infrastructure software to be used in a mission-critical environment, be it an operating system (think Linux), a database (think MySQL), a web server (think Apache), or an application server (think JBoss). The Open Source development process has been very effective at producing such software in a reliable fashion. Because the software gets deployed by more users, and because the source code is accessible to more contributors, Open Source offerings tend to outperform any closed source alternative over time. This is true for a process engine as well.

Second, the semantic of process execution at runtime is critical to some applications, especially for compliance requirements or security reasons. When the code of the process engine is open for all to see, no ambiguity can exist as to how processes will actually execute. And if the engine’s developers made an error in interpreting the BPEL specification, anyone is free to contribute a fix that will benefit the entire community of users.

Third, processes are everywhere, yet Workflow and BPM technologies have failed to gain mainstream acceptance, even though they’ve been available for more than 15 years now. One reason for this is that until now, BPM products have been built upon proprietary process execution models. Also, they have proven to be quite difficult and expensive for Independent Software Vendors (ISV) to embed within their own products. The wide adoption of BPEL is fixing the first problem, while the availability of a rock-solid Open Source BPEL engine is expected to address the second.

For all these reasons, we need a good Open Source BPEL engine. Here is one!