JOnAS Mutatis Mutandis

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Red Hat announced a few days ago that it will buy JBoss. Congratulations to both companies. For sure this deal will bring the best to both, and it's bad news to their competitors. This announcement can be seen as a sign that the open source market is getting more mature as the (open source) software industry is starting to concentrate.

What does it mean to ObjectWeb? Is it bad or good news? The announcement immediately raised concerns in our community. Analysts said it is a terrible blow for JOnAS and, as a consequence, for ObjectWeb. Well, there's no denying that the announcement seems badly detrimental to JOnAS. But the terrible blow jointly hit out by Red Hat and JBoss is not first aimed at ObjectWeb. Its main targets are commercial middleware supergiants (IBM, BEA, Oracle, Novell, etc) and to a smaller extent other Linux distros. At this point, JOnAS and ObjectWeb are not in the firing line.

Red Hat Executive VP of Engineering Paul Cormier has been re-elected to the ObjectWeb board in 2006. This means that there's a privileged communication channel between ObjectWeb and Red Hat. When the acquisition is effective, we can expect this channel to extend to JBoss as well. From Red Hat's viewpoint the decision to buy JBoss makes perfect sense. This is not a technology decision; this is a business decision. JBoss means a brand, an installed base (50% of which on Windows), instant credibility in the J2EE space, a portfolio of professional services, distribution channels, a market share and a fully operational team. To ObjectWeb, it is good news that Red Hat chose JBoss over Geronimo. It confirms that Red Hat bought a company, not a piece of technology. This acquisition tells nothing against the technical quality of JOnAS.

A very common misunderstanding is to consider ObjectWeb as an ISV. Although placed on Gartner Group's Magic Quadrants, ObjectWeb is not an ISV. ObjectWeb's goal is not to compete against commercial companies. It is to produce technology and to grow ecosystems. And this is happening today. The more concentration happens in the industry, the more there's a place for organizations like ObjectWeb. Far from collapsing, ObjectWeb is experiencing nice growth. JOnAS has been around for over seven years and has been instrumental in the commoditization of J2EE. Certification of JBoss, JOnAS and Geronimo announced that this part of open source history was almost over. ObjectWeb remains as a proponent of technology independence and as a collective commoditization strategy on many fronts, with components higher in the Java middleware stack: portals, wikis, business intelligence, workflow engines, enterprise service bus, RFID and the like.

JOnAS has been deployed in production in scores of enterprises by Red Hat, and also by others. Red Hat's Chairman, Chief Executive Officer and President Matthew Szulik declared that they have made a significant investment in the work of JOnAS and he expects that to continue. JOnAS' roadmap leads to Java EE 5. Version 4.7 stable will be out shortly. The EasyBeans project is also making headway to a full fledge EJB3 container, to be plugged in JOnAS 5 or other application servers. It is very unlikely that JOnAS disappears altogether, and this is the beauty of open source: projects can strive, evolve, merge and be taken over.

That's right, tables are turning in the world of middleware but for many reasons I don't see in the recent announcement a doomsday scenario for JOnAS but instead a full spectrum of opportunities. It will be everyone's decision to take them or not. And we, at ObjectWeb, will work to facilitate synergies. See you in a while...

Red Hat Acquires JBoss

Red Hat just announced in a press release that it will acquire JBoss for $350M. This will tremendously reinforce Red Hat's profile and position in open source middleware. It also sounds like good news to ObjectWeb: Paul Cormier (Red Had CTO) sits on ObjectWeb's Board of Directors, which means that there is a priviledged communication channel between ObjectWeb and Red Hat - a channel which was missing between ObjectWeb and JBoss, even though the two organizations would meet every now and then.
This moves significantly reshuffles the cards in the world of open source J2EE. ObjectWeb today has two implementations of the J2EE specification (JOnAS and JOnAS PKU AS recently brought by Orientware members), and an implementation of en EJB3 container (EasyBeans).
Red Hat and JBoss are two very strong brands headquartered in the US, while ObjectWeb is gaining traction and visibility in other regions of the world (Europe, China, ...). The time is good now for discussions between projects and a communication channel is open between the communities.

Engineering Answer to EC Consultation on Patents

Engineering Ingegneria Informatica sent a well put answer to the EC consultation on the European patent system, which I quote and publish with their authorization here.

"In our opinion, software and business method patents stifle innovation and on the bottom line discourage, rather than reward, investment in innovation in the information and communications technologies (ICT) sector. Therefore, we believe that the executive governments of the member states of the European Union (hereinafter referred to as "the Member States") should take the appropriate measures to ensure compliance with the applicable law by the EPO as well as NPOs. However, the introduction of a more detailed set of substantive rules could, alternatively or additionally, serve the same purpose, provided that such a set of substantive rules would represent a departure from the EPO's case law."

"A minimum requirement, which is unfortunately not met by the patent systems of Europe at present, is compliance with the existing substantive rules on what can and cannot be patented. The grant of software and business method patents has been discussed in the answer to question 1.1.
There are indications of non-compliance of the EPO with the existing substantive rules in other fields such as biotechnology.
Considering that every patent constitutes a 20-year monopoly and that monopolies are generally contradictory to the notion of a free market economy, patents must only be issued with the greatest caution.
A strict liability regime such as patent law not only protects, but also endangers those who make independent creations. In the event of a willful infringement, a patent may do justice and, absent other viable business models, may be a necessity to reward investment in innovation. However, every use of a patent in a scenario of unintended infringement discourages from investing in innovation and, by depriving an innovator of the fruits of his efforts, runs counter to the basic idea of intellectual property. The business risk of
unintended infringement also comes with a cost for an enterprise, and it adversely affects a company's ability to innovate."

ObjectWeb Architecture Meeting - cont'd

Roland Balter gave an overview and status of the ObjectWeb RFID initiative.

Tom Rose & Ron Rose presented (remotely) the Singularity RFID/Sensor Integration Platform. Singularity supported by the i-konect company (and consortium First Open) under development for 1 year. In their architecture, they implemented EPM, EPC-IS not yet implemented. i-konnect's business model assumes that middleware is becoming commodity very quickly. Specific applications are to be the vertical/commercial ones. They intend OSS to accelerate adoption. The service component bus is based on JINI, their JMS transport is JBoss'.

Humberto Moran (Open Source Innovation) delivered a presentation focused on social implications of RFID. RFID has scores of industrial applications, benefits for consumers, etc. Humberto advises to read "Spychips" to whomever is serious about doing RFID. Is RFID creating an orwelian society? A major peril of RFID is privacy violation. Humberto makes the very important point that those who create technology should know how the technology they create will affect society. Concept of "watching the watchers", in a "Trasparent Society". This has a lot to do with open source. Privacy invasion: interactive marketing, finding oneself in the news, difficulties finding a job, denial of service, targeted robbery... One has the right to forget the past - everybody has skeleton in the closet. Whilst developed economies may cope with RFID, this technology can be used by authorotarian governments to create orwelian societies and perpetuate their power. In the long term, this will impact immigration ecological impact, human rights abuses. Drivers of privacy invasion are flexibility of use, pervasiveness, connectivity and functionality (capabilities). Why some technologies do not develop in the best possible way? Because of market failures, technology failures and social/political failures. Privacy is slowly disappearing as a natural right. Humberto proposes the creation os a privacy-friendly internet of things. The best way to protect sensitive data is not to create it in the first place! It's software (middleware amongst other things) that creates the links between data - this is the place where relations are made. So that noone can tamper with privacy friendly software is make it open source. Humberto proposes the concept of "privacy friendly" goods, the same way as one can chose organis or fair trade.

ObjectWeb Architecture Meeting

The Q2 architecture meeting organized by ObjectWeb is being held today and tommorrow. The morning session was focusing on ObjectWeb projects: either existing or proposed.

Sebastien Bahloul presented FederID, an identity management project. FederID relies on InterLDAP (an identity management project written on Java on top of Tomcat), LASSO (impl. of Liberty Alliance specifications) and LemonLDAP (SSO reverse proxy).

Daniel le Berre presented SAT4J, an (AI, to use a buzzword) ObjectWeb project for satisfiability. Satisfiability is the idea to find assignments of variable that satisfy a set of clauses built from a propositional language. Satisfiability is a NP-Complete problem (proven in 1971). SAT solvers are used in production, also for "fun" (eg SuDoKu, crosswords, etc). "Commoditization" happens in SAT solvers due to standardization of input format: people can take any solver they want as long as it is designed to be embedded in other software. SAT4J is a library for Chaff-like solvers, in Java. The projects was started in 2003, its efficiency has been validated during SAT competitions, and it is designed for "end users". SAT4J may be used in a semantic web context, to work on ontology matching (eg S-MATCH project). OpenOME is an Eclipse plug-in for requirements engineering. Daniel proposes to work on a distributed/Grid SAT solver at ObjectWeb. People knowing how it can be designed on a Grid are required (eg ProActive).

Gianfranco Boccalon (Spago project leader) presented an update on Spago. Spago is evolving towards SOA (possible links with Petals, Celtix, BPEL, UDDI ...)

Dominique Leroux from Oxymel presented OFC Charts. The Oxymel company has been created by experts originating from the O2 project (object oriented database). Oxymel derives 90% of its revenue from services (10% from framework licenses). Oxymel proposes OFC Charts to ObjectWeb. OFC Charts creates graphs (SVG based on Batik): pie charts, vertical line charts, stacked bar charts, speedometer, explode pie charts, gauge charts, complex charts, etc. Oxymel wants to go open source due to customer demand.

Laurent Guérin gave us an update on Telosys, an ObjectWeb AJAX framework. Telosys is made of a client-side AJAX/JavaScript framework (DHTML or XUL), a server side framework and productivity/development tools as Eclipse plug-ins (DAL Object generator, screen builder). v1.0 is planned for end of April. Telosys is to bring best of two worlds: lightweight clients + client/server. It brings quality and productivity to the development process. To use Telosys, all one has to do is dropped telosys.jar in the project and... voila. During the dialog handled by Telosys, no assumption is made on the kind of client accessing the server: could be a browser, a rich client, another server. The JavaScript library is contained into a single telosys.js file.

The last presentation of the morning session was delivered by Alain Boulze and Adrien Louis about JOnES, a RNTL project (kicked off March 9, 2006). Alain conducts the ESB initiative at ObjectWeb, while Adrien is lead of the Petals project. JOnES aims at giving a one answer to integration problems, reusing other ObjectWeb projects. In JBI, contained distribution is considered future work. JOnES/Petals promotes a vision of a distributed JBI environment seen as a single container. JOnES follows a Fractal architecture. JOnES has the nice approach of aiming at SCA compatibility in addition to JBI, thanks to the use of Fractal.