14 DAY TRIAL // eBay has made its first steps towards becoming involved with the open source world with the launch of a dedicated website and the release, in beta, of Tumeric, a service-oriented architecture platform used internally by the site. It's the first big project the company has released as open source, but it will not be the last.
Note that eBay has been involved with open-source projects in one way or another for quite some time now, but it is now taking a more formal and bold step and creating its own portal for open-source software.
Turmeric is aimed at large sites that need a reliable and scalable architecture to deploy their services. While it is based on technology used by eBay internally, it's entirely generic and can be used as is in any number of situations. It also doesn't rely on any eBay specific technology, standard or service.
"Turmeric is a comprehensive, policy-driven SOA platform that you can use to develop, deploy, secure, run and monitor SOA services and consumers. It is a Java based platform, follows the core standards (WSDL, SOAP, XML, JSON, XACML, REST), and supports a variety of protocols and data formats. Eclipse plugins help with the development of services and consumers," eBay explains.
Open source software powers plenty of the biggest sites in the world. Google, Facebook and many other take pride in the technologies they developed, but also in using open source underpinnings rather than stodgy old enterprise software like other big companies.
There's been a definite move in recent years, by the big web companies to not only embrace open source technology and software, but also to start releasing internal software and code as open source for the benefit of the community.
And it's not just small projects or scraps of code, even the underlying infrastructure is developed in the open in some cases, for example, like Yahoo does with Hadoop.