OS3G - Open Source, 3rd Generation

A (humble) attempt to publish news from the trenches where Free/Libre/Open-Source Software is brought to the mainstream -- and Francois Letellier's blog, too

Monday, August 29, 2005

Geronimo Not Certified?

Sounds like Geronimo is actually not certified yet. Although the code passes the J2EE TCK (Technology Compatibility Kit), geronimo apparently is not yet officially "certified":

Geronimo web site, release M4: "This release is feature complete and passes the J2EE TCK automated test suite, but full certification is not yet complete."

Friday, August 26, 2005

Right to Reply

Apache recently accepted Synapse as an incubated project. The news has been announced in a press release distributed by WSO2. The press covered this announcement.

There's no denying an increasing number of people in the community are concerned about the way open source is used in tactical moves that may jeopardize the long term sustainability of some projects. This is in no way specific to Apache nor to Synapse. Organizations such as Apache, CodeHaus, Eclipse, ObjectWeb, OSDL should address these questions with the greatest care. We as nonprofits have the duty to act responsibly for the common good and to promote cooperation.

For lack of clear public policies to govern collaboration between organizations, any apparent discrepancy between the agendas of any two organizations can be interpreted as the early symptoms of a major crisis.

Apache and ObjectWeb have long built good relations. But good relations don't sell paper (nor hits), and some magazines bet on controversy to catch the reader's attention. Why did Apache start the Synapse project while ObjectWeb was already working on similar matters? Turning this question into a cross-organization squabble indeed can produce highly inflamatory papers.

In recent articles I've been quoted on this topic -- and too often misquoted. It was not the first time, it won't be the last. When it starts, it spreads like wildfire. Please keep this in mind when you read stories about Synapse and Celtix.

Monday, August 22, 2005

Economic Perspective on Open Source Middleware

I worked on a paper about economic aspects of open source middleware: "Due to its function as a key enabling technology for the information society and to its compliance with open standards, middleware is quickly commoditized. The middleware market therefore appears doomed to fail even more drastically than other software markets. The success of free/libre/open-source software, originally created for ethical reasons, may be explained by interpreting it as a new paradigm that provides effective answers to the structural flaws of the market. Now that mainstream industry players realize that this approach makes economical sense, we propose a new rationale for middleware development. A business-neutral meta-organization federating vendors, customers and governmental agencies shall target the sustainable development of a business ecosystem where stakeholders could develop beneficial middleware strategies in line with their business and societal requirements. Experiences accumulated within the framework of the ObjectWeb consortium confirm this vision and suggest some balanced principles for governance."

I made this paper available in PDF, although it's still a work-in-progress.

Friday, August 19, 2005

Conspiracy Theory, Explained

So... No British Open Source Connection (see James' answer to my previous post)!

Apache Geronimo's announcement on TheServerSide, Aug 5, 2003:

"Section 0.2 : warning signs
----------------------------
We feel that this project has a good chance for success as the following warning signs do not apply to the project we are proposing :
[...]
c) Homogeneous developers: The current list of committers represents developers from various backgrounds and open source projects, employed by various companies and based around the globe in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia. There will be no majority bloc, at least from the start.
d) Reliance on salaried developers: None of the initial developers are currently paid to work on the J2EE project.
[...]
f) A fascination with the Apache brand: The committers are interested in developing a healthy open source community around an ASF/BSD licensed J2EE certified server, whether Apache is the right place or not."

The British Open Source Connection?

James Strachan's blog: "Its been really busy in the open source world lately."

ServiceMix is lead at CodeHaus by James. He also is an Apache Member and one of the founders of the... Apache Geronimo project. Geronimo was first developed by a team at Core Developer's Network, then controlled by GlueCode. James was in this team. GlueCode was selling close source J2EE solutions. GlueCode has recently been sold to IBM. James worked with CDN. On Apache's web site, he is now listed as an employee of SpiritSoft, a provider of... close source ESB technologies.

CDN is located 27, Old Gloucester Street, London, UK. SpiritSoft UK headquarters are 78 Cannon Street. I don't live in London. But I tried Mappy to see how far these two locations were. Answer: less than 2 miles apart.

It's a small world!

PS: the little conspiracy theory plotted in this post obviously was a joke. As James put it: "most of the developers of Geronimo and ServiceMix are all in the US, not in Britain". The're no such thing as a British Open Source Connection. Sigh.

Sonic to Start an ESB Project at Apache

Gavin Clarke announced in the Register that Sonic will start an ESB project at Apache.

Over 1 year ago, ObjectWeb started an "ESB initiative" to foster the advent of open source ESB technologies. Some vendors, including Iona, joined this initiative. Iona announced Celtix in June.

Interestingly enough, ObjectWeb met Sonic in September 2004 to talk about the ESBi. Met David A. Chappell, who did not sound so convinced about open source at this time. Sonic did an interesting presentation at the ESBi launch event, in Paris. Jonathan Airey (Software AG) gave a presentation there too.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

2nd Day at LinuxWorld

Nice talk with folks from COSI (Carnegie Mellon West university), organizers of the upcoming first COSI conference. Met Donna and ObjectWeb chief architect Emmanuel, from Emic.

Sushi lunch with Stephen K. Kwan (San José State Univ) and Cliff Schmidt (Iona and Apache VP). Stephen studies the economical dynamics around open source projects. Cliff recently accepted to take care of legal matters for the ASF. Greeted him with an "good luck". He confirmed that he usually gets such greetings, wheras anyone else for anyother position would receive congratulations! Cliff is VP of Apache and also very familiar with ObjectWeb. He was the one who did the submission of the Celtix project to ObjectWeb.

Apache is considering mitigating its guidelines wrt licenses, so to allow projects to have dependencies (or actually reuse and bundle?) LGPL components. This would make collaboration between ObjectWeb and Apache much easier. A first objective might be to make parts of JOnAS & Geronimo pluggable into one another server.

In terms of collaboration between the two organizations, Cliff and us (Christophe and I) agreed that it would be a nice step. Another one would be to introduce guidelines in the Apache reviewing process for incubated projects. They would request project submitters to look around for projects from other communities (eg ObjectWeb, CodeHaus, ...). In the event that similar project exist elsewhere, Apache would require a strong case before accepting a submission that may otherwise turn out to be a reinvention of the wheel.

A natural examplification of the interest of such a process is the OSCAR story. After being an ObjectWeb project, a proposal for an Apache OSCAR project has been submitted to the ASF: "The OSGi community at large, several Apache committers and members would like to start a new project based on the existing Oscar OSGi Container which Richard Hall is graciously willing to donate". The project has been accepted in the Apache incubator without anybody noticing that OSCAR already was an ObjectWeb project.

The feeling I have here is that we missed a good opportunity to let Apache and ObjectWeb work hand in hand, whereas just creating a new (incubated) project at Apache may dilute efforts - not to mention the frustration of some ObjectWeb members who provided support, in terms of resources (eg academic partneships), promotion (keynotes at conference, etc) and enthousiasm. A better reviewing process for Apache incubated projects would help. ObjectWeb's process already takes into account the existence of similar projects in other communities.

Daniel Lopez, from BitRock showed up to say hello. Daniel did a wonderfull (and volunteer) work for ObjectWeb, by providing and configuring an installer for ObjectWeb's CD.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Feeling Glue

IBM yesterday announced at LinuxWorld their offer of support for Geronimo. This is pretty good news, for ObjectWeb too. First of all, it is the demonstration that commoditization is at work. Even IP giant IBM eventually puts on the market a free (as in free beer) low-end alternative to its proprietary appservers.

JBoss has a problem. This is no surprise. When a team of developpers quit JBoss and slammed the door 2 years ago, they forced the Geronimo project down Apache's throat. The plan was to demonstrate that JBoss was not invincible. The end is in the beginning. So, JBoss has a problem. This problem already is nicknamed "Big Glue" in the Valley...

The sad news is for Apache. The Apache board have considered Geronimo a high risk project from the begining. They also got a problem when Beehive, too blatantly controlled by BEA, landed in their code base. IBM buying Geronimo is a terrible blow to Apache's credo ("unlike in other situations where power is a scarce and conservative resource, in the apache group newcomers were seen as volunteers that wanted to help, rather than people that wanted to steal a position", see Meritocracy in How the ASF works). The foundation has a lot to lose, should it become a laundering facility for Big Blue's code.

So far, so good for nonprofit ObjectWeb. JOnAS remains arguably the more technically advanced open-source J2EE apperver around. Open-source J2EE is history. It happened, and now J2EE is fully commoditized, with 4 open-source implementations. The front is elsewhere.
ObjectWeb already is higher in the stack. Enterprise service bus, application platform suites, grid computing.

And it's worth thinking a while to what all who love the idea of collaborative open source development will think. SMEs around the world, and governements of most countries. They love open-source because of technology independance and lack of... vendor lock-in. What a terrible perpective to be left with the choice between JBossAS and IBM Geronimo... ObjectWeb has a lot to gain in terms of legitimacy here. Its vendor-neutral yet business-aware model is the only one that is able to reconciliate the interests of software vendors, governmental agencies, end users and individuals. Because it's designed for.



Just for laughs:

Sun's Gosling: "IBM is funding Eclipse 100 percent and it has ten times the cash flow of Sun."
Eclipse's Milinkovich: "How very sad to see such nonsense from a community leader."
IBM's Ferguson: "I bumped into Martin Nally, the Rational CTO. I forgot to mention Eclipse."

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

First day at LinuxWorld, San Francisco

ObjectWeb has a .org booth at the show. As for the last few LinuxWorld, we are neighbors with Usenix, and it's always a pleasure to meet Cat Alman (Usenix), who's on duty on almost all the shows! Discovered that my talk was actually scheduled on Thursday, 1PM, instead of today. Philippe Ombredanne (NexB) showed up from the Eclipse .org booth that he was helping man for a few hours. Joe Eckert (Open XChange) dropped by our booth to chat. Told him about the article on Open XChange's PR budget, then he hit the roof!

After talking with Paul Sterne (GM Americas, Open XChange), I got the explanation. In the article that Paul published in LinuxWorld, he mentioned a buget of less that $150k/y. The operative word here was "less"...

TBC

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

PR budget for Open Source projects

In a paper published in LinuxWorld, Paul Sterne (CEO of Sterne & Co. LLC) gives an idea of the PR budget invested by an open source company and the impact generated by this investment.

"For example, Openexchange Inc. was able to generate 10,000 software downloads per month for its Open-Xchange collaboration server with a public relations budget of less than $150,000 per year."

To get an idea of the impact of ObjectWeb, swap the figures: "generate 150,000 software downloads per month [...] with a public relations budget of less than $10,000 per year." ObjectWeb's PR budget is a fraction of the figure given above (actually, less than a tenth!). Yet, the total number of downloads for ObjectWeb projects was over 152,000/mnth in July 2005...

Imagine what ObjectWeb could do with a PR budget of $150,000 a year!