Did open source kill the component business?

For over a decade I've been hearing the same hype. The way to IT productivity is to build applications out of components.

For a time, the building of component models (like Microsoft's DCOM) was one of the computer media's best spectator sports.

But has open source simply replaced the component model with simple instances?

That's what Mark Matt Asay (oops) seems to be hinting at in linking to a Devsource piece advocating component architecture by two Gartner analysts, Dale Veccio and Matt Hoyle.

The two analysts were urging IT shops to assemble functionality from components. Don't code anything. Just re-use. They mentioned several sources -- partners, applications, Web services, and existing code.

Why go to that trouble, Asay asks, when you can simply insert an instance of an open source product -- a database, a content repository, a conferencing program.

Because, I think, that still sounds like work. Which leads me to this question. Why don't we have more open source component repositories? Why aren't those we have doing better?

If you have an open source shop, how often do you use Fedora?