How important is Mirth?

Fred Trotter recently decided to turn his regular talks on open source health computing into a series of blog posts. They are well worth looking at.

His review calls Mirth the most important interoperability project out there.  This despite what he acknowledges are weaknesses in the underlying HL7 standard.

Mirth is a great effort. There are implementations for Windows, Linux, the Mac OS, even JBOSS middleware. The most recent version is 1.7.1, released on April 30, and dozens of bug reports and improvement suggestions have already been posted.

Mirth is sponsored by Webreach, based in Irvine, Calif. It's a nice little company.

But why, in a ginormous industry, where every vendor talks big about interoperability, is this little company the sole sponsor of the most important project in the field?

Are major vendors like McKesson, Cerner and Siemens really going to implement HL7 interoperability Mirth-lessly? Would it not make more sense to provide Mirth with the financial and technical support it needs to make faster progress?

Or does that make too much sense?