FUSE adoption: is it the economy, or just the sheer love of innovation?

There's a nice post on the adoption of FUSE ESB on ZDNet; in the last few months I've observed an increase in activity and excitement around FUSE. Why might that be? As the entry's quote from Debbie suggests, economic conditions certainly are prompting users to ask questions of their existing close-source providers, and evaluate in more earnest the open-source options and alternatives that are available.

From my perspective though, it's more than that: at a technical level I think users are seeing that the Apache projects that FUSE is based on - ServiceMix, ActiveMQ, Camel and CXF - offer a new way to rapidly create solutions for integration, SOA, and, REST. The potential for developers to rapidly create integration flows using Camel leaves most battle-hardened integration architects and developers bowled over with excitement.

And users are excited by OSGi too; I remember the day when Eric Newcomer, ex CTO of IONA, who was pivotal in bringing OSGi forward into the Enterprise computing space, presented to a group of us in Boston on how this OSGi could change the way we think about deploying Java solutions. David Bosschaert, a colleague of mine at Progress, has continued the charge of OSGi, and has put some very interesting stuff on OSGi and on distributed OSGi up on his blog, <coderthoughts/>. An of course, the illustrious and prolific Guillaume Nodet, also at Progress on the fusesource team, has done great work on driving ServiceMix 4 to an integration-focused OSGi based runtime.

So whatever the reason - economic pressure or technical advantage - I welcome the surge in FUSE activity :)