Cheesy Details

Paul Sterne, whom I met at LinuxWorld this summer, just published a paper in LinuxWorld where he presents ObjectWeb: "ObjectWeb is truly a Gallic institution with all the peculiarities of that wonderful nation of 200 different cheeses and the Ecole Polytechnique."

Thanks to Paul for this overview of what he calls a "membership" business model. There are a couple of (very slight and forgivable) inaccuracies in the article that I'll try to correct here. Although I sometimes talk in the name of ObjectWeb, I'm neither the Chairman nor the Executive Director of the consortium. It's a little exagerated to call me the "leader" of the consortium. Paul was kind enough to describe me as an engaging man though, which strongly incites me to forgive him altogether for any error in the paper!

But I can not let Paul describe OW as originating from the country of 200 cheeses. To my knowledge, there are over 400 different cheeses in France!

Later in the paper, Paul writes: "It [ObjectWeb] views IBM's recent acquisition of Gluecode, one of the main sponsors of a competing composite application framework called Geronimo (hosted by Apache Software Foundation), as a threat to its basic mission." Well, I guess what I meant when we talked is that IBM's recent acquisition of GlueCode is a threat to Apache's mission. Not to ObjectWeb's. Why so? Because Apache is supposed to be meritocratic and designed by individuals for individuals. Strong backing of some projects by commercial companies is not quite in line with the foundation's rationale. It actually is more in line with ObjectWeb's.

Oh, and a last thing. Published on Oct 12, 2005, the paper was dated "Nov. 18, 2005 05:00 PM"... Is it that Paul is becoming precognizant? I would not be surprised ;-)