marc fleury wrote:
JBoss J2EE certification effort.
JBoss is increasingly used in production and as you all move to
production we realize that certification brand becomes an important
check mark. We have the financials to take it on, so we are. So many
people have asked us where that was at and the press is having a field
day with the story. It seems everyone likes drama. So there is no
drama at least not anymore on our side. For all intents and purposes,
JBoss has agreed to ALL the conditions imposed by SUN. It includes what
for us is a hefty sum of money. They didn't give us a break, they
didn't give us any break, which is kind of normal if you think about it
as there are many parties involved and SUN must treat all licensees the
same. In short the ball is in SUN's court and we are looking forward
to inking the contract.
Good news!
Apache J2EE effort.
First a bit of history. I offered EJBoss when it was 4 month old to
Apache. The guys at Jakarta vote OK unanimously and their vote was
overridden by Brian Behlendorf. The reason from behlendorf was that they
'were not the dust bin of open source projects'. I heard the Apache
crowd got offended for me calling them "a bunch of fat ladies drinking
tea" at a later date when they were running around telling us how to run
our project. We had reports that this was the non-official reason for
this "challenge". Challenge accepted. More seriously as we overtake
them in corporate penetration and business model, I guess they are
finally looking beyond the HTTPD C codebase and imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery.
We are the real thing, all we have so far is talk and announcement,
announcements are a dime a dozen. Apache code on this project has yet
to be released and then production reached and then maturity bla bla
bla. I have little comment on the project except to say that JBOSS IS
NOT A PART OF IT. In a misleading announcement Apache chairman's Greg
Stein implied JBoss was participating and that JBOSS CODE WAS PART OF
THE PROJECT. No current JBoss developers are participating in the
Apache J2EE project and since JBoss is LGPL only full copyright holders
can offer JBoss code under other licenses. Bottom line? JBoss can't be
forked by apache. As our customers know, we are a business, a serious
one and we seriously believe in and defend "professional open source".
That includes legal protection of IP. Make no mistakes, JBoss will
AGGRESIVELY defend its copyright and LGPL license.
I did not find in the announcement e-mail sent by Geir Magnusson Jr.,
James Strachan and Richard Monson-Haefel from Apache any mention that
"JBoss was participating and that JBOSS CODE WAS PART OF THE PROJECT".
What they wrote is:
- "The initial developer community for this project consists of
developers from Apache, Castor, JBoss, mx4j, and OpenEJB projects."
- "The initial developers are listed below and consist of some existing
Apache committers together with committers from Castor, JBoss, mx4j and
OpenEJB."
- "The initial community is made up of existing Apache, Castor, JBoss,
mx4j , and OpenEJB committers."
- Also there was an initial list of committers which included members of
CDN, which are currenly thrown away from the Sourceforge JBoss
developers list. At the time of announcement these developers were among
the JBoss _open_source_project_ developers.
If you really "overtake them in corporate penetration and business
model" and if you "are a business, a serious one" and "seriously believe
in and defend "professional open source", why participation in another,
even competing, open source projects is impossible for JBoss
_open_source_project_ developers?
I better understand now what the JBoss Group's former slogan "All your
J2EE belongs to us" means :-( Sorry if I misspelled the slogan, it has
been replaced now.
Do you remember that "JBoss Group is the peace of mind choice."?
Do you remember that "JBoss Group is a worldwide organization ...
dedicated to the professional servicing of JBoss technology" and not to
serve as the project gendarme?
Do you really believe that the mission of any JBoss
_open_source_project_ developer is to make profit to JBoss Group?
Do you really beleive that the JBoss's success is not partially a merit
of those who were thrown away by the trademark owner this summer?
Do you really beleive that such a behaviour will help the JBoss project
to compete against another open source J2EE projects for minds and
hearts of J2EE developers, who are the main sales force for JBoss?
Do you really beleive that the JBoss Group has enough weight to behave
like Microsoft to their own partners who became or can become their
competitors in future?
We hired Remy Maucherat the lead developer of Tomcat 5 on Monday and he
What would you tell if after this announcement Remy was excluded from
the Apache Tomcat developers list and lose the tomcat commit rights?
What makes you so angry, Mark? Aren't you afraid of loosin
