Sometimes the impact of standards in creating value and moving the industry forward are overlooked. In recent months I have been involved in many discussions around business process and BPEL specifically. There are issues with BPEL and they are being publicly discussed and worked on by many people. Propriety solutions are only worked on by internal developers and customers of a single organization. The flaws in propriety solutions are usually closely guarded and do not have the benefit of other smart people trying to solve them.

The impact of publishing the specification for BPEL has created several efforts to implement BPEL (amongst them our own BPEL4e). The advantage of everyone working from the same specification is creating synergism and anything that gets a bunch of smart people working on a problem is a good thing IMHO.