End of ObjectWeb Consortium Agreement

The ObjectWeb story started somewhere around Grenoble in the Alp mountains in the late 90's and now spans the whole planet with active participation of members from several European countries to China to the United States to Brazil.

This phase of growth brought new opportunities and new challenges. In order to better address them, the Board of Director decided in early 2005 to start a task force with the mission of evaluating possible scenarios and implementing the most suitable of them. As a result, it was decided to make the transition from the current organization, namely a consortium represented by INRIA, to a full-fledged, nonprofit independent legal entity. This new entity will be incepted in January 2006 as a nonprofit association under the French law headquartered in Brussels, Belgium.

The ObjectWeb consortium agreement will end on December 31, 2006. Current members are strongly encouraged to join OW2, but memberships will not be automatically transfered.

In the short term, I keep my hat as project director with INRIA, but my mandate as Executive Director of ObjectWeb will end on December 31, 2006. This is an opportunity to look back to the good work done so far. Over the last 5 years, our community experienced tremendous growth, now counting over 70 corporate members, over 700 committers, thousands of individual members and contributors from many countries in all continents. Our middleware code based counts a hundredth projects for a total of tens of million lines of open source code.

I would like to thank all the people involved in this story, with special congratulations to the executive commitee (starting with former executive directors G. Vandome and C. Ney) and the team at INRIA, who has been very dedicated to its mission over the last 5 years.