 IBM said Wednesday that it is making its implementation of the Common Event Base framework for Web Services Distributed Management Standard (WSDM) freely available to the open source Apache Muse Project. It has previously contributed to the open source community through WSDM development tools for the Eclipse Foundation. "Wisdom," as WSDM is often pronounced, is an Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) standard that enables management of a wide variety of hardware and software. The standard brings autonomic, or self-healing, capabilities to systems management software used in data centres. Automating more aspects of systems management should result in lower IT support costs, as systems bottlenecks become easier to identify, and there is an increase in technology utilization. IBM officials said that with more than 30 of their products already incorporating WSDM, the company felt that the time was right to open source more of its code relating to the standard. These products include some of its Tivoli systems management software, its DB2 databases, its Rational development tools and its Virtualization Engine. IBM officials hope that open sourcing their framework will encourage other systems management software vendors such as CA and HP to suspend duplicate development work and embrace the IBM approach for building WSDM interfaces. With customers seeking systems management for everything, the ultimate aim is to have WSDM in every piece of software including operating systems. Customers have to deal with far too many different systems management tools across their operations and often have to manually integrate those tools themselves. IBM officials said that they intend to remain one of the leading contributors to Muse for WSDM, channelling critical customer requirements to the open source community. Along with its activities with Apache and Eclipse, IBM also contributes to more than 150 open source projects such as Aperi, Globus Alliance, Higgins, Mozilla and Open AJaX.
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