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Kirk Wylie and open standard MOM

Kirk Wylie thinks an open standard for MOM is essential. He's a software engineer and independent contractor who has worked with MOM systems for various financial institutions and has spent his working life battling the various proprietary variants of MOM. As a consequence he's passionate about open standards MOM, so we sat down with Kirk and talked about AMQP. He thinks of AMQP as the HTTP of messaging saying "Imagine if the web didn't have HTTP. Imagine if instead of having one protocol that would talk to everything I had to have separate client libraries for Apache, and Netscape Web Server, and IIS, and Zeus, and anything else that I wanted to support". As an active developer in the space, he's got the battle scars and has got involved in reviewing AMQP and evangelising it to the proprietary messaging vendors. Until last Friday, everything seemed to be going well.

The Red Hat patent

It was then that a patent application, originally filed in 2007, was automatically disclosed as part of the patent process. According to sources, the first that the Working Group knew about it was when two members of the group got Google News Alerts in their email. Red Hat claims that they told the chair of the AMQP working group at the time, but he didn't pass that information on. The patent application itself has no direct bearing on the current AMQP specification, but does specifically refer to routing AMQP messages using XML and XQuery to examine and decide on the messages destination. This is an area that the AMQP Working Group were hoping, in the future, to expand into, once they had nailed down the core AMQP interoperability specification. The AMQP Working Group do have an agreement that any patents that are held by members, needed for the AMQP specification to work, are licensed on a royalty free basis. But this Red Hat patent application is outside the current scope of the specification. The AMQP working group are planning a April 1st launch of the specification for public review.

The problem is that the lack of apparent transparency from Red Hat with the Working Group has led some to believe that although Red Hat's intentions may be good, their approach is going to have a severe impact on the adoption of AMQP. Wylie was furious, and wrote in his blog just how severe an effect he firmly believes it will be. In his blog, he points out that a number of the proprietary vendors in the MOM business already have XML based routing and have had for some time. Wylie believes that these vendors will worry about their potential liability if they implemented AMQP support to plug in to their existing XML routing systems. If the patent application is granted, it could see them infringing the patent and its easier for them to just not implement AMQP and avoid that liability. They already have their own proprietary message encodings and customers who are happy to use them.

Next: Red Hat's defence

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