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As official facts and news can now be read by everyone, I thought it was a good time for a recap and for a few comments and thoughts. You may find this post quite long to read, but well ... this is my industry viewpoint!

(1) Facts

Rumors were all at rage trying to figure out if BEA "ripped off" the Esper ESP/CEP open-source GPL licensed engine, which has been in the arena for more than two years, release after release, commercialy supported by EsperTech - hence the title of an hypothetical BEA WebLogic Esper Event Server of this post.

Now we know, BEA is using Esper to bring to the market its WebLogic Event Server and has an agreement in place with EsperTech, the dual licensing company beehind Esper and NEsper.

Now is time to shed some light on that topic. But first, let's recap...

(as it is a long post, I'll use the extended entry so click to read more - I'll just paste my congrats there but there is much more to blog about:

Congrats to Esper and EsperTech for their success with BEA, and congrats to BEA for this new product offering that trully shakes the complex event processing arena - perhaps not in what it does but more in how it was assembled and engineered - with a a best of breed approach all the way up.)

There has been two interesting posts recently regarding Esper.

One from Tim Bass, from Tibco, reporting from the InformationSecurityAsia2007.
Tim reports in his blog that complex event processing solutions like Esper can be used for extrusion detection (that is inverse of intrusion detection in a network where you want to track malicious users and software acting from inside, zombi machines etc.).
Tim reports Esper is already known from several experts in the field and is beeing considered for such use cases. Glad to hear and thanks Tim for the info.

The second interesting news appears in Intelligent Enterprise where Esper is beeing quoted as the only active open-source project for CEP - both for Java and .Net platforms (what, you never heard about NEsper? Bet you will !).

Esper is quoted separately from the so called more commercial solutions like Apama, StreamBase, Coral8, Tibco etc. Especially because Esper is a great initiative to bring CEP to mainstream thru innovative, affordable and a la carte approach as quoted here:

It 's nice to see Esper quoted, although I am not sure I would do such a difference between Esper and the others solutions available for the following reasons:

• Esper is commercially backed and supported - checkout Esper' founder company EsperTech


• Esper users include major investment banks already and other big shops - checkout the mailing list if you want to get a taste

Of course I can't say if those guys are evaluating Esper or if they run some of their production system with it already - so you never know who is a user evaluating software and who is ready / has already entered the commercial relationship with commercially backed open source software unless you ask and they dare to reveal it.

There's trully no difference in fact when you look at that from a community point of view.
When you are building open source software (which I have been doing for years now) there is only one thing that matters: the community.
The community rules the use cases and drives the product direction in unanticipated ways accross industries of all kind and size.

This is a typical mistake regularly done when trying to compare open source software and commercial software as two fundamentally different things. Would you start saying Linux is for small companies and Windows for the big ones...