Stephen Downes

This somewhat technical article launches readers into the world of the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS, but most often pronounced "bee-pell") and the Web Services Choreography Interface (WSCI, pronounced "whiskey). These protocols are used to choreograph the interaction of web services - for example, if a transactions fails somewhere, then you want all of the various services involved to revert to the original pre-transaction state. As such they are an essential part of the whole web services infrastructure, but they are also, as the author describes it, the stage of a showdown between IBM and Microsoft on one side, and the W3C (and just about everybody else) on the other. At issue is royalties: Microsoft, in particular, does not want to surrender the right to charge royalties for BPEL4WS. But the W3C - and just about everybody involved with web services - is not willing to accept a royalty-based standard. Anyhow, this article is a lucid introduction to issues and the dispute, explained with a pretty good analogy, and thus suitable for the average (but interested) reader.