Letter to the ObjectWeb and OrientWare Communities

Dear ObjectWeb members and partners,

ObjectWeb is about to undergo the biggest evolution since its foundation as a consortium in 2002 by Bull, France Telecom and INRIA.

ObjectWeb: Success and Evolution

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. 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 base counts over a hundred projects for a total of tens of million lines of open source code.

This phase of growth brought new opportunities and new challenges. In order to better address them, the Board of Directors decided in early 2005 to start a task force with the mission of evaluating possible scenarios and implementing the most suitable of them. This mission code-named “ObjectWeb v2” has been successful due to major commitment of ObjectWeb’s community. As a result, it was decided to make the transition from the current organization, namely a consortium hosted by INRIA, to a full-fledged, non-profit independent legal entity. This new entity, whose bylaws have been approved by ObjectWeb's Board of Directors, will be incepted in January 2007 under the French law as a non-profit association headquartered in Brussels, Belgium.

Creation of OW2: a Nonprofit Legal Entity

The new organization is registered under the name “OW2 Consortium” or OW2 for short. This new name is the result of ObjectWeb and OrientWare joining their forces to build a global and powerful alliance. After extensive consultation of the community, its rules of operation have been defined on the following principles:

· enhanced commitment from the members through three levels of membership: Strategic, Corporate and Individual

· deliberate market awareness with the underlying rationale to bridge the gap between enterprise developers and users

· a refined governance model promoting increased participation from the community, with three councils addressing technology, ecosystem development and operations

· possibilities to create local chapters so as to facilitate international development in a decentralized way

In Practice: What to Expect, What Actions to Take

The ObjectWeb consortium agreement is ending on December 31, 2006. OW2 Consortium is starting on January 1, 2007. Current members are warmly invited to join OW2 but memberships will not be automatically transferred. For this reason, it is very important that ObjectWeb members take the necessary actions to join the OW2 Consortium. Strategic and corporate members joining OW2 in the first quarter of year 2007, be them former ObjectWeb members or not, will be deemed Co-Founders of the association.

Joining OW2 will most likely require the involvement of your legal department. All necessary legal documents will be available online shortly and additional information is available on request. As CEO of the association, Cedric Thomas will lead the operations and be your main contact for all practical information.

No personal information will be transferred from ObjectWeb to OW2 without the explicit consent of the user. A simplified procedure will be put in place so that registered members and users of the ObjectWeb online facility can opt-in to have their personal information transferred to the association. Details are to be sent on all ObjectWeb mailing lists shortly.

From now on, new membership and new project submission will no longer be accepted by ObjectWeb. However in the short term the ObjectWeb web site and Forge will be kept up and running, so project and community activities be carried on without interruption.

We want to thank you all for having made OW2 Consortium possible. We are now counting on you to make it an even better place for great projects. We invite you all, developers, researchers, open source enthusiasts from over the world, to participate in this new and exciting endeavor. Last but not least, we would like to take advantage of this message to present you our most sincere season's greetings and wish you the best for year 2007. And long live OW2!

With warmest regards,

On behalf of the Board of Directors,

Jean Pierre Laisné – ObjectWeb Chairman

François Letellier – ObjectWeb Executive Director