I stopped working for IBM in October of last year (2019) after several decades. The EclipseTM PahoTM open source project was started in 2011 by IBM under the auspices of the Eclipse Foundation. I’ve been involved in it as a contributor since the beginning. The goal was to help create a community around MQTT – I think that has been achieved.
Working on open source has been a fulfilling activity. It allowed me to have largely unfettered control over my own work, to concentrate on the doing instead of talking about doing, and get direct feedback from users. On top of that, a feel good factor of being part of the open source movement and the mission described by the OSI:
Open source enables a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is higher quality, better reliability, greater flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.
Since leaving IBM I was motivated by that sense of fulfilment and responsibility to continue the maintenance and development of the Paho projects that I created. For a significant amount of time in recent years I was the only person from IBM to be working on Paho. Now, I’d like to be able to help out with all the Paho projects, but I don’t have enough time for that unfortunately. I’ve started by addressing at the backlog of the Paho C client. That’s going pretty well and I hope with two further releases in the near future I’ll have the issues down to a manageable level.
Fortunately since the beginning of the year, Ranjan Dasgupta from IBM has been working on the Paho Java client, so that’s one less item for me to worry about. I do plan to take a look at the Android client, and also start looking at the embedded C and MQTT-SN embedded clients, but probably not all at once.
Now we come to the main point of this post. I’ve heard mentions in recent conversations of some of the Paho client libraries being used in large projects or by significant numbers of clients of medium to large enterprises. In one respect, I sort of knew that to be the case, but it did take me somewhat by surprise. That’s maybe because now I am not employed to work on Paho, so I’m interested in the expectations that such users have for support.
While I was working at IBM we used a lot of open source software. IBM made and still makes large contributions to open source projects, both in funding and personnel. But small open source projects can find themselves left out in the arena with so many larger starry projects competing for attention. Sometimes I made small financial contributions to projects that I found myself using routinely, or were crucial, and especially if produced mainly by volunteers.
Also a few years back, we asked for any “success stories” of people and organizations using Paho components. We received a couple of replies, but I know for sure that there are many more successful deployments. If you are using a Paho software component, especially for production, then I’d like to hear from you. You can comment on this post, send email to paho-success@eclipse.org, or contact me on Twitter.
I’d like to be able to tell the world about any Paho successes. If you do rely on any of my work in Paho, then do consider sponsoring me.