I apologize for jumping in the middle.
It makes sense to have several different configurations and corresponding distributions, rather than bundling everything together. As long as there is a simple and easy way to "drop in (i.e replace)" a different servlet container, with everything else in-tact, that is sufficient, in my opinion. It will also be
useful to have 2 or 3 pre-baked configurations (e.g a light weight container ( servelets/jsp, JNDI, JDBC, JAAS and JACC), container with just the standard J2EE components, container with additional features like(some of these may not have been currently planned) High availability/clustering, resource management, auto-provisioning of servers/nodes based on demand etc.)
Re-configuring the server to support different configurations is a fairly trivial task. The intention is to actually package some of these configurations as maven artifacts during the normal Geronimo build but until then the plans for them can be found in the assembly module.
We (Gluecode) already do this to construct our JOE application platform which is targeted at certain usage models. Other organizations can, of course, do the same thing - tailor configurations for a specific application, workload, or customer requirements. Compliance with any thirdparty licensing provisions is left as an exercise for the user ;-)
-- Jeremy
