OS3G - Open Source, 3rd Generation

Blog discontinued - on to new adventures

2007-07-06T17:32:00.001+02:00

My mission with INRIA as executive director of ObjectWeb just ended. BTW I did my part in the inception of OW2 - a new association which will continue the work accomplished by ObjectWeb. So, I will stop blogging on OS3G - to move forward to new adventures, namely, being a freelance consultant on open-source strategies, business models, product development, marcom, etc...

It has been great fun to run ObjectWeb, and there's nothing to be ashamed of in what we accomplished. As I leave the floor to the new OW2 team, the ObjectWeb consortium is healthy, with 73 corporate members, thousand individual members, several new projects in the pipe, ...

So from now on my web site is : http://www.flet.fr and my contact address fl >at< flet.fr . See you there!

Candidacy to the OW2 Board...

2007-04-11T18:55:00.000+02:00

Well it's board election time in OW2 and I'm candidating as individual members representative. My candidacy (under the 'official' guideline) is below...

Motivations

We raised expectations, dreams and ambitions in ObjectWeb which I would like to see perpetuated. I offer to leverage the lessons learned in the ObjectWeb trenches and bring continuity between the now terminated consortium and the newly incepted association.

Although OW2, as a third generation OSS organization, is very dedicated to the needs of its legal entity members, we must keep in mind that our community hails from an free/open source software background. Individuals are important.

Because I'm ending my mission with INRIA, I joined OW2 as an individual member, not bound to any one legal entity member interests in particular. I offer to represent individual members and to help maintain the balance of powers in our global community.

The motivations of individual members range from raising their professional profile to the sheer passion for technology. They contribute to the overall expertise of the community, sometimes to the code base, and often act as champions in their organizations. I offer to do my part and keep spreading the word with an OW2 board member hat on.

Applicant Bio

15+ years of experience in software design, innovative engineering and project management (and... geek background since the early days of personal computing). Served as product manager in the field of EIS/DataWarehouse for the pharmaceutical industry. Co-founded a software consultancy and served five years as an associate for global corporations. Currently terminating a mission at INRIA (the French National Research Center in Computer Science and Automation) as project manager.

Joined ObjectWeb in July 2002, as the 17th registered individual member. Contributed to running the ObjectWeb consortium and community since 2003, and to bringing it to a membership of 73 corporate members and over 100 open source projects. First worked on ecosystem development / communication. Evangelized about ObjectWeb, its values, code base and rationale in the press and in over 35 events around the world. Evolved to a position of ObjectWeb deputy executive director, and executive director in 2006.

InTech Workshop on OSS and Biz Models

2007-03-29T09:03:00.000+02:00

In'Tech and GRAIN are organizing this afternoon (March 29, 2007) a workshop targeted to innovative SMBs on the topic of "Open Source and Business Models".

2:00 - 2:15 Introduction
Christophe Ney, Wanager, GRenoble Alpes INcubation

2:15 - 2:45 Open-source : strategies for the SMBs ?
François Letellier, Open Source Expert

2:45 - 3:45 Open Source license famillies
Stephane Dalmas, INRIA Direction du Transfert et de l'Innovation

3:45 - 4:00 Break

4:00 - 4:45 L'open-source dans une société de service
Intervenant : Alexandre Zapolsky, PdG LINAGORA

4:45 - 5:30 - Open source business models : returns of experience
Panel discussion hosted by Gilles Talbotier, Directeur Grenoble Alpes Incubation

5:30 - Adjourn

Registration: http://rev.inrialpes.fr/intech/Registration

Presentations will be delivered in French.

Free Software World Conference

2007-02-10T09:11:00.000+01:00

I'm just back from the Free Software World Conference (Badajoz, Spain). This time I regretted only taking 4 years of Spanish while in high school (all sessions were in Spanish, except some side workshops). Attendance was impressive, with an estimated 500-600 attendants to the opening session.

IDABC hosted a workshop on OSOR (the Open Source Observatory and Repository), a recently incepted project of the European Commission, DIGIT. The workshop was chaired by Francisco Garcia Moran, Director General of DIGIT. The OSOR project will implement: a pan-European information platform on OSS: continuing and improving the work of the IDABC Open Source Observatory OSO in providing news, guidance, links, contacts; a platform for uploading and downloading software produced by and for public administrations: providing registry and repository for software; a platform/forge for cross-border collaboration: providing technical, organisational, and legal support. I sitted in a panel discussion - which was for me the opportunity to convey two messages: first, bureaucracy-packed projects from the EC such as OSOR must keep in mind where OSS hail from, and make sure people scattered around the world, far from Brussels, and with limited resources (that of an individual often times) can be involved too; second, that communication is pivotal in the success of an open source project, to grow the community, reach critical mass and make it sustainable.

Workshop organizers arranged an evening chill-out event in a club right in the old town. The club was reportdely sued for not paying any royalties on the music they play. They won the case though, as they argued they only play Creative Commons music. During the party, the beamers would proect huge "Creative Commons" clips on the wall, which I originally thought were especially chosen for the occasion and the crowd (free software people). But according to my (insider) sources, it goes like this all year around. As Alexis Monville put it: "they are gonna change the world!"

ObjectWeb village on Solutions Linux 07

2007-02-01T20:34:00.000+01:00

This year we did not organize an ObjectWeb conference in Q107, simply because the ObjectWeb consortium agreement was over. Yet, the team arranged a village on Solutions Linux expo floor. In my experience, it was the best ObjectWeb stand/village ever on this show. This at least demonstrates that we learnt from experience and that trial and errors fine tuning eventually pays off. The nice thing with the village was its open atmosphere, with no cumbersome piece of furniture blocking sight. ObjectWeb members Sogeti, Engineering, Thales, EBM WebSourcing and Edifixio were on the village. I also had the pleasure to chair a day of conferences about open source middleware / ObjectWeb. It was a very well packed day indeed with both technical and busines oriented presentations. It ended with a refreshing presentation by Benjamin Mestrallet, who demonstrated eXo's killer WebOS.
Amongst other pearls, I especially liked this comment from Laurent Guerin, who explained out of solid field experience, that it's always very hard to explain to the CIO why it needs more time, more staff and more budget today to do the same as we used to do, 10 years ago, with 4GLs...

So What's Next?

2006-12-21T18:28:00.000+01:00

The ObjectWeb consortium will end on Dec 31, 2006. As explained in previous entries, an association called OW2 is being incepted.

This is the opportunity for me to thank (again) many people, actually so many I cannot mention them all. Special congratulations to those who were at the orgin of ObjectWeb. Their endeavour is going a long way. Thanks to the executive committee members, who made it possible and who, day in day out, run the community and acted, often behind the scenes, to let good things happen. Thanks to the developers and contributors: without them ObjectWeb would be an empty shell.

Personnaly, the consortium being over, I will no longer serve as executive director (it really goes without saying!) On January 1, 2007, I will keep serving as project director at INRIA. Staff from the project I lead will sometimes be involved in the OW2 operations. Yet INRIA will be a member of the association, but no longer the legal representative as it used to be for ObjectWeb.

Seasons greeting. Merry Christmas, happy new year, best wishes for 2007 to all the community members and friends around!

Letter to the ObjectWeb and OrientWare Communities

2006-12-21T17:31:00.000+01:00

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

ObjectWeb and Orientware merge to form OW2 Consortium

2006-12-19T18:15:00.000+01:00

The new "OW2 Consortium" 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 to facilitate international development in a decentralized way.

The ObjectWeb consortium agreement ends on December 31, 2006 and OW2 Consortium takes over on January 1, 2007. Current ObjectWeb and OrientWare members (along with new comers) are invited to join OW2.

Membership will not be automatically transferred. 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 can be carried on without interruption.

End of ObjectWeb Consortium Agreement

2006-12-18T14:07:00.000+01:00

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.

Last ObjectWeb Board Meeting

2006-12-13T19:11:00.000+01:00

On Dec 11 & 12 was the quarterly ObjectWeb Architecture meeting, held in Paris (Alcatel HQ). A board and a college meeting were held on Dec 11. They were the last such meetings to be held in the framework of ObjectWeb.

ObjectWeb is an agreement (basically a contract) which ends on Dec 31, 2006. It has been decided not to renew it... but to incept a new, independant nonprofit legal entity instead. Code-named "ObjectWeb v2" so far, this new association is to be registered by the end of the year. It will then after continue and expand ObjectWeb's activity under the name "OW2". OW2 is really a name for insider: it basically comes from the collaboration between ObjectWeb and OrientWare - two O-something-W-something names.

The last board meeting was the opportunity to look back to the tremendous progress achieved by ObjectWeb over the last 5 years. Some figures... as of today, the community counts:

72 corporate members (+1 registration pending)
8177 registered users in the Forge
723 CVS committers

2006 was anticipated as a year of transition between ObjectWeb as it used to be and OW2. Thanks to all people involved in the Executive Committee, with the help of the Board and contribution from the members, we ran ObjectWeb in line with the then current consortium agreement. Since April 2006, 15 (+1) new corporate members joined and 15 new projects were added to the code base (again, +1 pending). This is a pretty vibrant community, which is now to be handed over to OW2 for continued expansion.

Two ObjectWeb Projects Winners of Free Software Awards 2006

2006-12-05T18:04:00.000+01:00

OpenMobileIS and SpagoBI won Gold and Silver Awards in the 'Company Management' category of the Free Software Awards 2006. OpenMobileIS is a Java Framework conceived to integrate mobile application developement business. SpagoBI is a complete suite for the development of Business Intelligence projects in an integrated environment.
The picture show Philippe Delrieu (Ubikis, left) and Marc Sallières (Altic, right) holding the awards during the cocktail reception.

European Task Force on ICT Uptake

2006-11-27T20:25:00.000+01:00

Today was the final meeting of the Task Force on ICT Sector Competitiveness and ICT Uptake which I attended as an observer, after having participated in the works as co-cordinator of the working group on innovation and participant in the working group on IPR. Commissionner V. Reding, Directors-General F. Colasanti and H. Zourek participated in the meeting, along with representatives ("sherpas") of the industry and observers.

The discussions in WG2 (IPR), chaired by SAP, were animated to put it midly. The group came to the conclusion that IPR was too conversial a topic to reach a decent consensus. Some members in the group also felt that all opinions were not taken into account with equal openness. For instance facts tending to question the positive correlation between some forms of IPR and innovation in some sectors (software) were reported as beliefs or positions of a minority. On the other hand, commonplace statements such as the necessity of increased IPR protection for the sake of fostering innovation were depicted as reflecting a wide consensus.

It came to a point that ObjectWeb requested that all mentions of the organization be withdrawn from the topic paper, in order to avoid distortion of input - avoiding distortion being a legitimate request in our eyes that apparently was beyond reach.

I proposed that the following statement be inserted in the topic paper for this WG, which (to my knowledge) has not been performed in spite of support by several participants in the group: "Group members acknowledge that there's no wide consensus on the correlation between IPR protection and innovation. Studies performed by independant authoritative researchers came to different conclusions depending on the context. In some contexts, some forms of IP protection are beneficial to innovation and economic growth; conversely, other forms may instead act as an obstacle in other contexts. As stakes are high for Europe, one should be wary of common beliefs and generalizations. The concept of IPR encompasses many different realities, from brand protection to patents, and the ICT sector produces a full spectrum of products from information to hardware. IP protection has been developed during the industrial revolution and is still a reality in our world, but the way we want to shape it for the information age should be considered with care and with an open mind."

In addition to co-coordinating WG3, ObjectWeb contributed a position and proposals about openness-based innovation, which were echoed in the topic paper of WG3, but not in the final report of the ICT Task Force.

Here is this contribution for the records:

"Support emerging innovation strategies based on openness.

The term open innovation has been proposed as opposed to closed innovation to describe the process of “combining internal and external ideas as well as internal and external paths to market to advance the development of new technologies”. However benefits of openness in innovation extend beyond this. When dealing with innovation, the specificities of the ICT sector must be taken into account. One of the most salient is the production of both material/physical (e.g. consumer electronics) and information/digital (e.g. software) goods – and compounds of them. Material and information goods are extremely different and it is necessary to set up an innovation policy for the ICT sector that differentiate between these various kinds of artifacts. Emerging models of innovation based on openness leverage the ‘non rival’ nature of information goods and gain increased global impact while relying of continuous, incremental, peer production practices that are poorly captured by traditional innovation measurement techniques. Open source software is one example of collective work, often performed by individuals or companies and which delivers quality and sustained innovation without protection of creation being a central motivation.

Recommendations:

Academic studies of innovation based on openness should be supported through adequate funding from independent sources (e.g. through instruments such as EC-funded research projects). Appropriate metrics and measurement methodologies need to be developed. Such metrics need to be elaborated in an “out of the box” fashion, so to reflect not only direct economic impact in the ICT sector, but also the enabling effects and externalities of innovation based on openness.

The European IPR policy should keep a balance between the need to protect innovation and the opportunity to favour incremental innovation in an open context. As examples, the burden of proof should be on proponents of new rights and registration of prior art should be facilitated so to reduce the risk on incremental innovators; for digital goods, this may be achieved by facilitating (with regulatory and technical measures) or even automating on-line registration of prior art at no cost.

Technical means for remote inter-personal communication, telecommuting, collaborative online work and management should be improved. This should include public incentives which would create demand for such systems and result in a pull effect on the ICT sector itself (need for broadband networks, adequate telecommunication services, etc). Open standards play a pivotal role in the development of infrastructures software in the information society: two features are essential to the deployment of the information infrastructure needed by the information society: one is a seamless interconnection of networks and the other that the services and applications which build on them should be able to work together (interoperability).

When dealing with information goods, and in a very much “the fab is the lab” fashion, virtual clusters should be put in place as alternative to traditional clusters. This would bring answers to the increase of transportation costs and environmental impact and give opportunities for enhanced territory management. Such virtual clusters should be targeted to great challenges and provide the necessary environment (in terms of infrastructure and services) to facilitate the leverage of open innovation.

In order to leverage innovation based on openness for the benefit of the ICT sector, bridges should be built between communities with grass-root structure, academia and the business world. This may be achieved through 'meta-organizations' able to federate both individual and organizations around innovative activities based on openness. The European Institute of Technology could play an important role in this. It should include a virtual, distributed unit targeted to innovation based on openness. Activities should be structured according to the best practices of current innovative communities (e.g. open source software, Wikipedia and similar initiatives, etc). Learning, research and creation would be mixed in a single overall process, innovative production be peer-reviewed and registered as prior art in real time and made available to all in an open way, so to impact the industry and civil society at large through appropriate business models.

In parallel, appropriate funding mechanisms should be designed at the European level to facilitate the deployment of open innovation systems, leveraging on EU public funding and debt and equity instrument of the EIB group."

Ironically enough, my feeling as one of the youngest participants in the WG on innovation was that the group was short of ideas to innovate... in an innovative way. Apart from the above attempt, I did not see any input which would emphasize on the disruptive practices that we saw happen in the last decade(s), with the arrival of 'digital natives' both as young adults and new workers. A suggestion would be to inject younger blood in future working groups on innovation, including enthustiats, volunteers, entrepreneurs who may live far from the Commission's corridors, but much closer to where the digital society is being built, and transformed, into tommorrow's information society.

IST2006 Networking Session on ONESSI

2006-11-23T20:34:00.000+01:00

The IST 2006 edition of the most important European event in the field of Information Society Technologies coincided with the launch of the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research and Development.

NESSI is a European technology platform aiming to provide a unified view for European research in services architectures and software infrastructures. It will define technologies, strategies and deployment policies fostering new, open, industrial solutions and societal applications that enhance the safety, security and well-being of citizens. As a founding partner, ObjectWeb contributes to the open source activities in NESSI through an endeavour called “ONESSI”.

ObjectWeb co-organized a networking session with COSS (Finnish open source competence center) about open source software and ONESSI.

Participated to this session:

Morfeo, Spain
ObjectWeb
COSS, Finland
Linux Solution Group, Germany
Piedmonte Open Source Center
University of Szeged, Hungary
Politecnic University of Madrid, Spain

Bull Signs Partnership with JBoss

2006-11-21T19:52:00.000+01:00

"French systems and services provider Bull has formed a broad partnership with JBoss that could see the Red Hat subsidiary's open-source middleware used more widely in Europe." (InfoWorld)

From a Bull perspective, this move makes perfect sense. But it also is an excellent opportunity for ObjectWeb to develop closer relations with JBoss and their community of users – as anticipated when Red Hat announced the acquisition of JBoss. As an independent, nonprofit organization, ObjectWeb – today, and ObjectWeb v2 soon – has an important role to play in the global open source middleware landscape that commercial entites cannot take in isolation. Open source is first and foremost about collaboration, simply because it's a rational, proven approach to build commons and to develop innovative strategies in the software arena. I would like to congratulate Bull for its long term commitment to open source and for paving the way today to new fruitfull collaboration on enterprise grade open source middleware. I also invite ObjectWeb members to welcome this announcement and explore new opportunities with an open mind.

And anyway, ObjectWeb is open. JBoss may very well join as a company. This would be an interesting message.

Open Source Java

2006-11-15T10:00:00.000+01:00

Sun recently announced the distribution of Java in open source. To be more specific, it means that J2ME would be open sourced soon, J2SE in six months or so (both J2ME and J2SE Sun implementations released under GPL2 with classpath exception), and Glassfish (J2EE implementation by Sun) changed from CDDL to GPL (GPL2 w/ CP exception).

This is good news for the Java and open source communities. Distribution of J2SE and J2ME under an open source licence will undoubtedly foster the adoption of these technologies. It makes Java clearly 'compatible' with Linux - and will please all open source proponents (and users) that were a little concerned to use Java open source projects while still relying on a close source VM. Now it will be possible to have a full open source stack (e.g. Linux + J2SE + open source middleware + bespoke or OTS applications).

The choice of GPL is meaningfull, and a clear signal toward Linux - at a time when Microsoft and Novell signed a deal around virtualization technology. Java (SE and EE) can also be considered as a virtualization platform (remember 'build once run everywhere'?) from hardware independance all the way up to the Grid.

Sun has been playing with legal frameworks to ensure compatibility of open source projects to the JSRs (e.g. J2EE certification of JOnAS, JBoss, Geronimo) and now has enough experience to make sure that open source implementations of J2[SME]E remain interoperable (and compliant w/ the specs) even in case of fork. The idea is simple: you do what you want with the source code, but to call the binary 'Java' you have to have it certified. The keystone of this scheme is Sun's control over the 'Java' trademark(s).

Yet this may not be the end of the story. What will be the answer from OS communities such as Apache (with Harmony), who've been historically (and geographically) very close to Sun, and who advocate for so-called 'business friendly' open source licenses (APL*) ? What will be Sun's position wrt GPL v3?

Issuing a position to the upcoming EU consultation on RFID

2006-06-28T16:17:00.000+02:00

The European Commission is soon to start a consultation on RFID ( http://www.rfidconsultation.eu/docs/ficheiros/JdS_RevGS.pdf) through 'your voice in Europe'. We proposed the idea of coming up with an ObjectWeb position to contribute to this consultation. Such document may typically be a four-page paper.

We are not starting from scratch.

You will find attached a report from a working group run in the framework of a study from the French Ministry of Industry. This document (in French) covers many aspects that, to me, seem fairly well aligned with ObjectWeb's (emerging) position. During the first 2006 architecture meeting, Humberto Moran (OSI) proposed to work along the line of 'privacy friendliness'. I think this is to be taken into account too.

DADVSI Law to be Voted Tommorrow

2006-06-28T13:13:00.000+02:00

The French government has been pushing for the adoption of a law (known as DADVSI) that may significantly increase the level of legal risk for open source projects and communities based in France. The press has started to echo this kind of concerns, including wrt ObjectWeb's situation:

http://www.theserverside.com/tss?service=direct/0/PostNewsReply/postReply&sp=l39953&sp=F&sp=l206387

ObjectWeb Chairman Jean-Pierre Laisné sent a few weeks ago an open letter to all senators, expressing our concerns. Amongst others, we ask the question of keeping ObjectWeb headquartered in France, or moving to another - more 'open source friendly' country.

Gartner OSS Summit, Barcelona

2006-06-14T16:22:00.000+02:00

In Barcelona only for 1 day. Attended two presentations: one from M. Felix (Amadeus) about their use of open source, the other from Mark Driver (Gartner) about OSS Business Models. Sounds like 2005 was a transition year and today, visions on OSS business models tend to converge. There's definitely no one business model for open source. According to Mark, all other facts being mitigated, close source will not gain over open source. All other things equal, close source will never win. He lists 7 models for vendors: Consultancy, Service & Support, Packaging, Stack Integration, Patronage (aka 'Loss Leader'), Extend & Enhance (aka 'Embedded'). Jean-Pierre Laisné sat in a panel this morning.

ObjectWeb Architecture meeting, Q2-06

2006-06-12T18:03:00.000+02:00

The quarterly meeting was in Lille this quarter - hot weather, by the way, I was not expecting that! Hot presentations too, with a first talk by Peter Andersen about PalCom. Peter was so kind as to schedule his trip to Lille only 4 days in advance when we confirmed we had a slot for him. The project aims to research and develop a new perspective on ambient computing denoted palpable computing. This sounds well aligned with ObjectWeb's scope and we feel there may be opportunities to work together.

Impressive presentation by representatives of Orientware who presented the projects they work on, including that at ObjectWeb: PKU-AS, XService, ISTX, OrientwareCCM. I would say they talked of so much technology I just can't give an account of it.

Another day well spent!

OSS2006, Como, Italy

2006-06-09T20:09:00.000+02:00

It's definitely not a pain to go to Como (Italy) for a conference. Although I leave all year surrounded by mountains (Grenoble), I must admit Como has a very special atmosphere, due to the steep mountains around, the lake, villas, warm weather, vegetation and.. Italian pasta! The OSS2006 convention in addition brought excellent papers. I want to highlight here the paper from CALIBRE team about business models. It really brings new answers to the question of open source business models, with the concept of "whole product" and, by the way, gives good insight on the value proposition that ObjectWeb may offer to its members.
Also speznt some time sitting in a panel with Stefano de Panfilis and Brian Fitzgerald. Interestingly enough, Brian came up with this concept of OSS 2.0 - which is roughly what I call "3rd generation of open source". It seems that we are converging here - except for the version number...
This trip to Como and OSS2006 definitely was time well spent!

LinuxWorld, Sao Paulo

2006-05-22T22:55:00.000+02:00

Gosh, it's already over 1 month since I posted my last blog entry. It's so busy in ObjectWeb these days...

I'm back in Sao Paulo for LinuxWorld, where I'll deliver a presentation tommorrow, and where ObjectWeb has a booth. I think that it's by far the most sophisticated booth we had so far, and I must here salute the organizers of the event...

Speaking of presentations. I was on the 11th in Geneva for a presentation at the LinuxDays. Worth mentionning that, speaking with various people, it turned out that the Swiss government (should I say governments) is increasingly serious about open source.

Oh, BTW: ObjectWeb is hiring. You may find the open positions on Monster too.

JOnAS Mutatis Mutandis

2006-04-18T20:34:00.000+02:00

com
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

2006-04-10T15:02:00.000+02:00

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

2006-04-05T19:44:00.000+02:00

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

2006-04-05T16:48:00.000+02:00

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

2006-04-05T15:24:00.000+02:00

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.

Consultation on European Patent System

2006-03-23T18:01:00.000+01:00

The European Commission (Directorate General for Internal Market and Services) is consulting stakeholders on their needs in relation to the legal framework and possible actions in the field of industrial property. More specifically, the Commission is consulting European players about the patent system in Europe, with the goal to make proposals to improve this system.

Many analysts consider this consultation as an opportunity for software patents lobbyists to bring back on the table their proposal to extend patentability to software.

A few months ago, the question of software patent had been fiercefully debated in the community and in the European Parliament, with intense lobbying from pro- and againt- software patents. The bottomline has been a massive rejection of the directive proposal for broader patentability of "computer implemented inventions", a mild wording for "software technologies". Along with other open source stakeholders, members of ObjectWeb have expressed their concerns about software patents. It is worth noticing that we got support in this respect from folks from outside Europe, e.g. the Apache Software Foundation.

So, today, the threat of software patents is surfacing again. I strongly encourage companies with interests in Europe to answer the consultation. A very good source of inspiration is Florian Mueller's position paper from his blog, and for French readers, the position paper from Gérald Sédrati-Dinet (FFII France), which I found very well put.

Recommended reading:

The Bright Side of Open Source

2006-03-22T10:40:00.000+01:00

Pierre Cros (Entr'ouvert) pointed me to a blog entry from Susan Wu, Chief Marketing Officer of the Apache Software Foundation. Susan addresses the question of how the open source model has been "watered down". Between the lines, you may read that there are two sides: the bright side of open source, with the "true" open source players, and the dark side of it, with bad guys taking advantage of the wave for marketing purposes.

Quoting Gianugo Rabellino from this blog entry: "[...] we’re seeing how the status of Open Source is just too much up for grabs by anyone, and easily circumventable using a few tricks that have become “classic” as in the sentence above. I don’t really have a solution handy: I’ve been thinking about starting a new “movement” under a different umbrella which would encompass Open Source yet augment it with the most prominent value coming from community-based development, but I know this would require quite some effort and a lot of inertia to get the ball rolling."

Right, the term "open source" in its strict meaning only describes a category of licenses (which roughly matches what the FSF calls "free"). But is there more to open source than a legal framework?

As proposed by Business Week, 2005 was probably a turning point for open source. Part of the reasons was that open source players eventually became profitable and the Valley VCs not longer overlooked open source startups. The bottom line is, in the Valley and elsewhere, that any old ISV now is open source in a way or another. This is becoming ridiculous: software vendors all have "their own" open source solutions, different from other -open source- solutions from their competitors. So what's the value of open source here? Is reinvention of the wheel the open source way to go? We all doubt it.

Yet, legally speaking, all players are open source because they distribute software under an open source license.

Form an Apache viewpoint, I can understand that some old timers of free/open source software feel bitter. The Foundation was created with a couple of strict principles in mind, including meritocracy, avoidance of brand fascination, etc. What is remaining of this old meritocratic spirit when software giants buy open source credibility (cf BEA / Beehive), use open source as a dumping strategy (cf IMB-Gluecode / Geronimo - ironically enough, IBM pushes talks calling projects "true open source")? I can understand that some feel bitter.

Yet, one may wonder if open source in general, and Apache in particular would have been so successful without discreet support from the same software giants: code donations from some (Sun / Tomcat), code promotion by others (IBM / httpd), not to mention massive communication about open source from all sides. Biting the hand that's feeding open source...

Gianugo is calling for a new movement. But this movement is already around - and I call it "third generation of open source", just because I failed to find a more appropriate wording.

Third generation of open source is a collective strategy aiming a developing open source software through a collaborative process that encompasses more than just code. Because the world is a-changing, and because the business world now is taking over the open source wave.

Collaboration in an 3G open source organization may not happen at level of single projects - and one may even argue that some projects leaders come from the dark side of open source. But the ultimate goal is to have cross-projects collaboration. To bring back the value of open source at a higher level. And because the parties involved no longer are individuals, but also legal entities, a governance model that goes beyond meritocracy is needed. Such governance should be open and transparent, so that the organization be not used as a smoke screen. The open source world is to face the cold reality that open source now serves commercial interests, and it is the price to pay to become more mature and be ready for the next step: unleashing the value of collaboration at a cross-organization level. Or put in other words: yes, there are ethical reasons for going the free/open source way, but there are also sound economical motivations and, beyond, externalities in term of social welfare that policymakers take into account. The open source picture is becoming global. The genie is out of the bottle.

And it's legitimate that all try to make a living for themselves in this open source world. What's damaging to the open source movement is the propagation of urban legends from the good old days. Not values - legends.

For Japanese Speakers

2006-03-22T09:21:00.000+01:00

I don't have the chance to speak Japanese, but for those who do, here are a few links to Yoko Sueoka's blog:

Enjoy!

So What's an "Initiative" Anyway?

2006-03-20T17:25:00.000+01:00

ObjectWeb lately came up with several "initiatives", namely the ESB initiative, RFID initiative and ONESSI.

The existing open-source communities address technological issues in a very efficient fashion. But they leave companies alone when it comes to complementing software with all that takes to make a product: positioning, packaging, customization, training, professional services, communication, quality assurance, certification of compliance with standards, etc.

ObjectWeb came up with the concept of open source “initiative” to address these shortcomings and bridge the gap between open source projects and enterprise users.

An initiative is not an open source project. An open source initiative is a collaborative program undertaken by industry stakeholders to promote a set of technologies and bring them to the mainstream. The goal of an initiative is to federate complementary projects through the involvement of several partners from industry and research communities, so as to initiate and perpetuate innovation and business opportunities.

So. Initiatives are proactive attempts to strenghten an ecosystem through a collective strategy. They are akin to collective strategies (or better said, ObjectWeb in its entierity may be seen as a collective strategy instanciated through initiatives as a matchmaking tool). I would put initiatives in the class of "organic collectives" (see Astley, W. Graham, Fombrun, Charles J. (1983), 'Collective Strategy: Social Ecology of Organizational Environments', The Academy of Management Review)

New ObjectWeb Board of Directors

2006-03-01T11:38:00.000+01:00

ObjectWeb's Board of Directors has been renewed. Here's the new board:

Elected Legal Entity Members Representatives

Engineering - Stefano de Panfilis
Experlog - Pierre-Yves Gibello
GMRC - Hongbo Xu
IONA - Eric Newcomer
Red Hat - Paul Cormier
Thales - Serge Druais

Elected Individual Members Representative

David Li

Seats of Right

Bull - Jean-Pierre Laisne
INRIA - Jean-Bernard Stefani
France Telecom R&D - Valere Robin
Chief Architect - Pierre-Yves Gibello (interim position)
Executive Director - Christophe Ney

EasyBeans: Open Source EJB3 Container

2006-02-24T13:02:00.000+01:00

Folks from the JOnAS team started a new cool project at ObjectWeb: EasyBeans.

In a nutshell, EasyBeans is a plugable, efficient and easy-to-use EJB3 container. It can be used standalone, with a web container or in a J2EE appserver. It comes with nice deploy/redeploy features.

Compared to the previous version 2.1 of the EJB specifications, EJB 3 aims to simplify application development with EJBs. When designing EasyBeans, project leader Florent Benoit and his team focused on making the developer’s life even easier.

See JOnAS team weblog.

ObjectWebCon '06 Feedback

2006-02-22T12:14:00.000+01:00

Damn! Time flies and it's already weeks since my last post... It's so busy at ObjectWeb these days.

Catherine Nuel, ObjectWeb's event manager who worked to organize the 5th annual conference, ObjectWebCon '06, collected feedback about the conference:

68% of the attendees where from France, 32% from other countries
43% were ObjectWeb members, 57% not ObjectWeb members
63% came from the private industry sector
Quality of content was rated "Excellent" by 67% of the attendees, "Good" by the rest
the SOA session was the most appreciated, with 75% "Excellent" and 24% "Good"

Generally speaking, we got good feedback both from attendees and from visitors/sponsors of the ObjectWeb Village. Co-location with Solutions Linux was well appreciated too. I personnally noticed that the session about "ObjectWeb explained" (Wednesday morning) was pretty packed.

During this session, we presented plans for the future of ObjectWeb: "The ObjectWeb consortium is giving itself a makeover this year to make its open-source software more suitable for business use and to help it expand further outside Europe. [...] The changes aim to address what ObjectWeb sees as shortcomings in the way most open-source communities operate. With open-source software becoming mainstream, staff must be appointed to ensure that road maps are adhered to and to deliver software 'of a level of quality that enterprises can rely upon,' the group said. 'In an international and multicultural environment, this requires more than an informal community,' it said."

For those who did not make it to OWCon '06, we gather a photo album available online. All presentations are available online too. Enjoy!

NESSI Forum - Brussels

2006-01-26T17:35:00.000+01:00

Spent the whole day at the NESSI Forum conference in Brussels today.

Quick facts: about 340 attendees, 123 organizations (incl about 35 universities), 18 countries represented.

Morning

Opening Session

Mr Jean-Paul Lepeytre (Senior VP, Thales and NESSI Chairman) gave the welcome address. Jean-Paul thanked the European Commission for its support to NESSI. One main challenge for NESSI is to contribute to the change of the European economy toward a service based economy. In this vision, open standards and open source are to play important roles. Making Europe stronger and improving the well being of citizens are key objectives of NESSI. The first NESSI forum aims at presenting and explaining NESSI to the general public, with the second goal to provide concrete information about the way to get involved.

1st Session - service economy

Dr Jan Bosch (VP, Nokia Research center) argues that there's a major change taking place in society: an orientation towards services. Eg: from buying a train ticket online to being physically transported by train; SMS appointment cancellation and rescheduling services... Well, not suprisingly, most of Jan's examples in a way or another relied on mobile phones. Discussed socio economic trends are: faster communicatiuons, better utilization of competences and ressources transition from standalone business models to networked business organizations, transition from products to services and faster feedback cycles. Jan eventually dropped the "Web 2.0" buzzword: computing moving towards the edge of the network; platformization of software technology; software engineering evolves later binding. Ubiquitous wireless infrastructure and mobility are key enablers of societal evolution. Products become attached with invisible on-line services. Need to build and maintain trust in the network. Jan listed key technical challenges for NESSI: user interface, trust, constant change of implementations, scaling for better performance, end-user empowerment, constant change of demand and supply, market creation.

NESSI's motto is: "NESSI is about transforming the EU economy through service oriented business models" -- customer driven approach; look at customers, citizens, end users; vertical prototypes to get the horizontal issues; multidisciplinary approach; partner and learn together with Open Source (Jan sees it as a major enabler and argued that companies need to learn to become part of the open source community rather that just be users of open source); speed up using shorter iteration cycles.

Mr Joao Da Silva (Director European Commission) presented what an "European Technology Platform" is. A key function of ETP is to deliver a "Strategic Research Agenda" to steer the direction of European research for the 10-20 coming years. Beyond research funding is the idea to create a "club" of partners sharing a same vision. Jao sensor came back on the idea that computing is moving to the edge of the network, mentioning networks, RFID. Network complexity is gonna be increased by orders of magnitude. Systems working on the Internet may just not scale up. Reliability, certification may become increasingly important. "The future is bright, the future is NESSI," said Jaoa as a concluding remark. Mr Ulf Dahlsten (Director European Commission) then took the stage. He reemphasized that NESSI is about making the European economy better on innovation. To do this, it is neccasry to have a better link between the European commission and the industry, and it is a motivation for ETPs. A legal definition used by the Commission of an "European company" is having operations / research in Europe (as opposed to legal ownership -- and this is why "Big Blue" is, ironically enough, European after all). He emphasized on the fact that Europe is increasingly a deregulated world. Ulf expressed he wants to see practical results, want to see industry growing, ...

2nd session - SRA

Dr Joachim Schaper (SAP) started his presentation talking of market expectations for SOA. He said customers want to lower risks, increase process flexibility and accept complex world environments. The IT industry will transform, and NESSI will foster this change. 25 years ago, wa had integrated lines of business. The in the late 80s/early 90s, came more flexible lines of business -- it was a best of breed era. What we are looking at, Joachim argues, is more adaptative business networks (not technical networks, but the way businesses interact).

Core concepts of NESSI are explained in a high-level, synthetic "holistic view". The core services are grouped in the "NESSI framework" (mainly IT & software). On top of this framework, the "NESSI landscape" constitues a business level of services. Economic value is to be derived from these services. Engineering on the NESSI framework needs to be performed in a collaborative manner.

Core services includes an infrastructure layer (network, grid, virtualization, SOA, etc), a service integration layer (connectivity, etc) and a semantic layer (modeling business rules). Cross-cutting topics are trust & security, interoperability and management services. NESSI will, Joachim said, build on principles like trust and dependability, open standards, foster open source, comprehensive view, quality and independant implementation.

Q&A Session

Stefano de Panfilis (Engineering) was one of the responsibles for assembling the first version of the SRA. Stefano will give a presentation next week during ObjectWebCon '06, in Paris.

An attendee pointed out a major concern (that had been pointed out by Jean-Bernard Stefani during the first ONESSI workshop) is with the layered model, to create legacy / incumbent environments which are very hard to get rid of.

Question was brought up of the place of academics and SMEs and tangible results they may use. After publication of SRA v1, input from the community will be gathered to create next versions.

JP Lepeytre pointed out that NESSI is the result of unlikely collaboration between 13 players that most often are competitors to one an other. The competition between continents is outdated, Jean-Paul said. What brings the NESSI founders together is the conviction that everyone will benefit from collaborating to making Europe stronger.

Several questions were related to proliferation of standards and the dominence of US based standards bodies over standards. The answer is a greater emphasis on open standards. NESSI may ba a place where participants may discuss about standards before allocating resources to participate in standard organizations.

Last question was from a Microsoft employee, arguing there are 27,000 companies deriving revenue from non open source business models and asking what would be there place in NESSI...

Afternoon

2nd session cont'd

Krishna Nathan (IBM) started the afternoon. IBM's prefered buzzword today seems to be the newly coined concept of "service science". I'm not sure how much of a science it is, but this is not the point here. Krishna presented some of the evolutions that go with the shift from a product oriented economy to a service oriented economy: Invention -> Innovation; Build to forecasted demand -> Detect demand and respond; Product functions -> Value to customer; Information science -> Service science; Single discipline -> Multiple disciplines; Central innovation model -> Innovation with client. "Enterprises are deconstructing into more componentized business functions for improved productivity and flexibility -- this is being accelerated by Web Services and SOA". Krishna advocated for oepn standards enabled interoperability.

3rd session - Getting involved

Reinhold Achatz (Siemens, NESSI Vice Chairman) introduced his speech by mentioning that Siemens definitely is a software company (more developers than Microsoft). NESSI Forum will count 4 communities : ICT Industry, SME, USer, Academic & Research. Working groups are created as needed (current: SRA, Governance, New members, Forum and Communication). New working groups to be created: identify major topics and application areas, collect new ideas, invite community members and assign responsibilities. NESSI would like to establish a member states "mirror group" to coordinate research projects, national project selection, goals and research strategies. A NESSI office will be established soon; the facility has already been found in Brussels. It will be necessary to monitor projects instanciating the SRA: establish project assessment approach, project labelling approach. About standardization: need to define topics of interest, identify and liaise to relevant standardization efforts, identify interested partners and install working groups. The SRA is to be developped in volumes: Volume 1 (available) is about "Framing the future of the SO economy", Volume 2 (expected May 06) about "Strategy to build NESSI". SRA v3 will come in section, the first (7/2006) being the short term road map. The labelling process is to be defined before FP7 Launch. Somewhere in the future there would be a NESSI "reference implementation". Open source community communication is to be started now. Citizen communication would start somewhere betweeb 2006 and 2008.

Dario Avallone (Engineering) explained how to become an active NESSI member. NESSI he said is the translation of Italian "nexus": "cooperation links". It's about achieving a goal that none of the partners could achieve on its own. So why should one be involved? To make NESSI happen (contribute to the transformation of the European economy, to improve the well being of European citizen and society). Academia, research, ICT, users, policy makers, SME, SME associations should get involved. There are 3 levels of membership in NESSI: the NESSI community contribute to "participative awareness"; NESSI members contribute to NESSI (main work force); NESSI Partners (13 founders) take care of coordination. The NESSI Forum will meet at least once a year to discuss, validate and plan NESSI progress in achieving vision and goals. Each community in the forum will have a representative in the Steering Committee. Participation (becoming a member) is subject to completion of a registration process handled by the NESSI office. Online registration will start February 1, 2006 (www.nessi-europe.com). Participation to working groups will be open online starting Feb 15, 2006. In terms of governance, a Steering Committee will be composed of 13 founding plus 3 representatives for each committee (total 25 members). Application to participation in the steering committee will be open between February 15 and March 31, 2006. The Board will count 1 person for each founding partner plus 1 representative for each community (total 17). Online Board application will be open between Feb 15 and Mar 31. Governance has been structured to achieve the right balance between openness and effective coordination.

Jean-Jacques Léandi (French Ministry of Finance and Industry - directorate general to the modernization of the State) explains the challenges facing when it comes to serving a large spectrum of "users" and interconnecting information systems of various administrations. He explained that packaged solutions would not fit the bill, but tailored made systems are neccessary.

Roberto Gagliardi (Metaware, an Italian SME, a spinoff from CNR, the National Research Council) gave the view point of a innovative small European company. He said NESSI is a good opportunity for an SME such as Metaware. NESSI is democratic and has mechanisms to valorize small players. It will encourage trans-national cooperation. He argued that transforming the EU economy through service oriented business models means understanding the dynamicity of local business models. Often times, he explained, technology developpers are backed by a whole supply chain of SMEs and labs specializing in high tech domains. Open standards and open source software enhance the availability of trusted software resources by SMEs. Also, SMEs contribute in extending the acceptance on open source based services.

Pr Ian Sommerville (St Andrews University, Scotland) presented the viewpoint of an academic on NESSI. He said that a large number of funding projects over the last 20 years have addressed what NESSI is about to address. He highlighted that many of these projects never deliver business success. He mentioned Atmosphere (never heard of), a monolithic project, a waste of 100 million Euros he said. What's needed is mechanisms to bridge the gaps between industry and academia, but also between industry and industry. He appealed for the development of well founded theories to address real problems. Beware of bureaucracy and bean counting he said...

JOnAS "Missing Manual" Available!

2006-01-09T11:34:00.000+01:00

JOnAS Live, the first "missing manual" on JOnAS is available for purchase at SourceBeat. JOnAS Live is co-authored by Stephane Traumat, a JOnAS enthusiast since the early days. Stephane has in depth expertise on JOnAS and a long track record of public presentations about JOnAS and J2EE development in general.

JOnAS' online documentation is pretty good by open source standards. Yet, JOnAS Live comes as a complement, and also as a tutorial about how to get the best of JOnAS from very simple to advanced applications. The sample chapter is a good "getting started" manual in itself.

Come to ObjectWebCon '06!

2006-01-06T17:04:00.000+01:00

This year, the ObjectWeb annual conference is collocated with Solution Linux, one of the main GNU/Linux and Open Source software events in Europe (about 10,000 visitors). An “ObjectWeb Village” gathering conference sponsors will be featured on the main show floor. This co-location is designed to combine a mainstream mass event and a distinctive high-profile conference.

Program:

January 31, 2006

morning - plenary keynote sessions
afternoon - parallel sessions: enterprise grid and enterprise information integration

February 1, 2006

morning - parallel sessions: Open Source business models and focus on ObjectWeb
afternoon - parallel sessions: service oriented architectures and e-government

February 2, 2006

General Assembly of ObjectWeb members
morning & afternoon - parallel sessions focused on ObjectWeb projects

Keynotes:

Jesus Villasanté, European Commission member – “The middleware strategy from a European viewpoint.”
Paul Sterne, CEO of Sterne & Co. LLC – “The evolution of Open Source business models”
Steve Craggs, Founder and President, Saint Consulting Limited; Vice-Chairman, Integration Consortium – “SOA Ecosystems - The Secret to SOA Success”

The ObjectWeb conference will take place at CNIT, the world-class conference hall of Paris La Défense, on January 31-February 2, 2006.

To help organizers, register as soon as possible!

Open Source Connection... Cont'd

2005-12-02T19:16:00.000+01:00

Remember the little "conspiracy theory" I came up with on August 19, 2005? Was about the links between the people behind ServiceMix (a CodeHaus project) and Geronimo (an Apache project). Recent news is that ServiceMix has been proposed as an incubated sub-project of Apache Geronimo: exceprt from Apache's Incubator wiki (as of today):

"Currently ServiceMix is hosted at Codehaus, has a stable codebase and a large and vibrant community.

This proposal moves the existing ServiceMix community to Apache as a sub-project of Geronimo so it can better integrate with the rest of the Geronimo and other Apache communities like Axis and Synapse and to simplify the work of the community with the TCKs."

Sounds like we are in the middle of a concentration phase on the open source ESB "market". Apparently, Apache chose the model of external growth, by attracting mature projects from other communities. For example, it happened when the OSCAR project was "taken over" by Apache. Now, it's ServiceMix's turn.

Are we seeing an emerging pattern in the open source world? A pattern of external growth? Or is it a kind of fascination for the Apache brand? Is it the symptom that we'll see, in the near future, more convergence between CodeHaus and Apache?

ObjectWeb Best Use Cases Awards

2005-11-29T15:19:00.000+01:00

ObjectWeb launched the Awards for the Best Use Cases designation to be profiled at the 2006 ObjectWeb Annual Conference.

The OWCon06 Best Use Cases Contest is a challenge that allows any professional to file one or several submissions about real world use cases of ObjectWeb components and platforms. Then the ObjectWeb members will vote fore the best use case on the following categories:

Enterprise Java: production use of ObjectWeb enterprise Java components and platforms
ISV & Integration: commercial offering or development embedding some ObjectWeb components
Jury's Special Prize: any use of ObjectWeb components and platforms

Make sure to let people know of your best use cases of ObjectWeb middleware!

ObjectWeb RFID Workshop, Middleware Conference

2005-11-28T14:57:00.000+01:00

There is an ObjectWeb workshop today, at the Middleware 2005 Conference, about FRID. David Li (board member of OW representing individual members) presents a case for an ObjectWeb RFID Initiative.

RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) are small tags able to transmit unique ID through radio. They are expected to replace Bar Codes in the 10 years to come. Mandates from Wal-Mart, DOD, Target, Metro is a driver for adoption of RFID and next wave of IT business. A RFID can be attached to virtually anything, including human beings. Nokia recently introduced the RFID scanner cell phone. An application may be buying goods in vending machines while having their price imputed directly on your phone bill.

A vision of the future of RFID is an "Internet of Things"; tags everywhere, readers everywhere. It would be necessary to leverage the Internet to carry data. Current RFID tags (namely the EPC class of tags) have limited capacity of 96/128 bits to store their (unique) id. Providing a network infrastructure falls into the scope of ObjectWeb.

Exemples of applications include tags on boxes, tags in passports, fight against counterfeit drugs, livestock, pets, kids... Sounds to me that nobody wonders whether this future would be a Brave New World or just... hell.

Gartner's Hype Curve analysis puts RFID Peak of Inflated Expectations in 2004, Trough of Desillusionment in 2006 and Plateau of Productivity in 2018. Market size in 2008 is expected to be around $6.5 billion. The big players are the usual suspects: IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, BEA and RadioActive & FirstOpen in open source. In the Java space, two JSRs have been proposed by Nokia about the reader interface.

In the architecture, data filter and transport is an important aspect, because unlike bar codes, RFIDs are constantly on and the readers keep reading information. This is somewhat similar to what happens with mobile (cell) phones. Management of RFID infrastructure extends beyond managing the reader. For instance, it would also include management of sensors to detect moting of packs/trucks transporting the goods. The information network is necessary to share information in and between organizations.

EPCGlobal is leading the current specifications. It's mainly a hardware specification, American centric (generation 1 uses 900MHz). It is infested with patents (over 250). EPC Global IS 1.0 was published in Sept 2005. It's a land of proprietary systems (IBM, Sun, SAP, offer full infrastructure). Several countries develop their own specifications: Japan UID, China RFID Group, etc. Software standards are to be developped.

Today, Wal-Mart/DoD top 100 suppliers are shipping boxes and pallets tagged with RFID. RFID is not integrated into production. Data is transported over emails. So far, we're only talking of limited pilot projects. Yet, VCs already invested $1 billion.

Several ObjectWeb projects are available that would make sense in a software infrastructure for RFID: SensorBean, OSCAR: Reader Interface; Sensor Bean: reader management; JORAM, ProActive, XQuare, OCtopus, C-JDBC: Data Filtering, transport; JOnAS, Celtix, Petals: Data Request/Legacy System Support; SNAP, ProActive: RFID Information Network.

Some countries (China to begin with) already work on a counter proposal to EPC Global's ONS. ONS is based on DNS. The problems are: it's centralized administration and control; it's controlled by the US alone; it relies on 40 year old architectures. This is an opportunity for research in Grid data and overlay network.

The goal of a RFID initiative at ObjectWeb would be to reuse existing components, attract new partners, foster OS/Standard organization cooperation and eventually start an ecosystem in this field. EPC ALE/IS is the only emerging standard in the RFID middleware area, with certification/test suite not available till Q206. The ObjectWeb board accepted the proposal for starting a new initiative in October 2005. Initial participants may include: FirstOpen, GMRC, Macnica, ScalAgent, SensorBea, Yangfan Soft. Tangfan is one of the 54 members in the Chinese RFID standard workgroup under Chinese Ministry of Information Industry.

The Clueless Manifesto

2005-11-16T23:16:00.000+01:00

Talked with Cedric a couple of days ago and he mentioned the Cluetrain Manifesto (the book actually). Tonight I browsed it while having dinner alone here in Brussels, in a nice Asian cuisine restaurant named Citizen. And because I read it, I will not recommend reading it to anyone, and won't comment on it either. Those curious to know why may drop me an email.

Commissioner Reding about Internet Governance

2005-11-16T16:15:00.000+01:00

The World Summit on the Information Society is opening today in Tunis, Tunisia, and voices in the press comment the opportunity to hold such a summit in a country that has a mixed track record about freedom of speech. It's amazing how in mainstream media the Internet equals freedom of speech, and this is great, and this freedom is every day increasingly threatened, not only by rogue governments but also by laws ellaborated in democratic countries. But this is a long and controversial story, and this post is not intended to be a flame bait.

EU Commissioner Viviane Reding published a paper in the Wall Street Journal today about Internet governance, and more specifically, in favor of privatization on ICANN, the organism in charge of domain name allocation. Mrs Reding expresses that there is "no substantive difference of views" between the EU and the US in favor of a free, stable and democratic Internet. Mrs Reding is not in favor of "fixing what's not broke" nor of calling in the U.N. Her point rather is to advocate in favor of a multilateral cooperation model where governments would directly participate in an a governmental advisory committee, building upon the existing ICANN.

Talk at Upcoming Sou+Java Conference

2005-11-14T19:39:00.000+01:00

I'll deliver a talk on Monday (November 21, 2005) at Sou+Java International Developer Conference in São Paulo, Brazil:

Focus on Middleware: how Companies can take control of their infrastructure

Middleware is the new frontier for open source and brings opportunities to contain costs, to focus on innovative engineering, to find new sources of revenue and to go to market with unique competitive advantages. With members in about 80 countries and hundreds of committers, ObjectWeb is a fast-growing, nonprofit organization that focuses on high-quality open source middleware. For example, JOnAS from ObjectWeb was the first open source application server developed in a nonprofit way to achieve J2EE certification. The benefits of open standard compliant, production-grade middleware is made available to everyone as an alternative, or as a complement, to proprietary solutions.

In this presentation, you’ll learn how ObjectWeb succeeds in creating a business ecosystem that is a land of opportunities for all open-source players from research labs to innovative SMEs, from global companies to governmental organizations.

ObjectWeb / Orientware Agreement

2005-11-04T16:42:00.000+01:00

Today in Shanghai, ObjectWeb and Orientware signed a MoU to promote the adoption of open-source middleware worldwide.

Orientware has given very few online signs of life so far. In the issue #414 of the Chinese Science and Technology Newsletter, it is described as "a proprietary mediumware product developed by Chinese software makers". Mediumware here stands for middleware, which maybe sounded too much like "software from the middle empire", unless it is intended to mean software for psychics...

The truth is elsewhere - Orientware is an organization that integrates the results achieved by the Program 863 in the domain of middleware by universities and institutes such as Beihang University, Peking University, the Institute of software for Chinese Science Academie and National University of Defense Technology etc. Orientware code base is a collaborative composition of various middleware platforms, such as CORBA, J2EE, TP monitor, portal and workflow built on open and standard technical specifications. The goal is to provide a comprehensive middleware platform for the Chinese national information infrastructure that could challenge its foreign counterparties with respect to performance and functionality.

In the short term, the collaboration will be kicked off by a cross membership between ObjectWeb and Orientware. Expert groups will be created. Orientware is to release parts of its proprietary code base in open source. After assessment, some of these projects may become ObjectWeb projects.

For ObjectWeb, this is a tremendous recognition of its position as the home ground for open source middleware players. This agreement is expected to foster dissemination and adoption of ObjectWeb technologies is Asia. For Orientware, the benefits lie in the opportunities to collaborate with European research centers, to contribute to adoption of standards and to gain credibility on the IT market. It's also a sign that the Chinese government is supportive of open source and may specifically target development of OSS in the next 5-years program.

SpagoBI -- First Open Source Unified BI Platform

2005-11-02T10:30:00.000+01:00

ObjectWeb member Engineering contributed the SpagoBI platform to ObjectWeb. SpagoBI is a unified business intelligence platform (Business intelligence software enables executives to make better decisions by efficiently accessing and analyzing business data -- for example data coming from production, marketing, finance, HR or sales departments).

It makes it possible to get a synthetic view over data aggregated from many different relational databases and data stores, using models and analytical tools (e.g.: reports, queries and dashboards) including the chance to integrate analytical services of proprietary products such as Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion or equivalents.

A typical example is the case of companies A and B merging. Company A uses Business Objects, whereas company B runs Hyperion. SpagoBI provides a platform to swiftly create new reports to the CEO that aggregate data from the two merging companies without having to modify the legacy systems. The ability to address such business needs is important to a systems integrator such as Engineering. This is the reason why Engineering decided to lead the SpagoBI project. Putting it under ObjectWeb’s umbrella is a way to ensure sustainability and adoption to the project, hence securing a market for professional services that would leverage SpagoBI.

SpagoBI offers the following classes of business intelligence features: data mining, QBE (query by example), OLAP (online analytical processing on dimensional analysis), reporting and dashboards. These features are all accessible in an Intranet mode, using thin web clients. SpagoBI does not reinvent the wheel - it leverages existing open source projects such as JasperReports, Lucene, OpenLaslo, etc)

SpagoBI also comes as a complement of other ObjectWeb projects (eXo Platform as a portal engine, JOnAS as a J2EE appserver, etc). With SpagoBI, the ObjectWeb middleware stack achieves a yet higher level of functionality and stands the comparison with leading proprietary solutions.

Associated with ObjectWeb workflow engines such as Bonita or Shark, SpagoBI may provide BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) features. In a nutshell, the idea is to let SpagoBI generate activity reports based on the logs that come from the workflow engines.

BYOC - Build Your Own Community

2005-11-02T10:22:00.000+01:00

On Sept 14, 2005, I blogged about an emerging OSS business pattern. The news today illustrate this pattern in the ObjectWeb sphere of influence.

Peter Sayer wrote about Continuent in ComputerWorld today. Continuent is the new name of EMIC Networks, a Finnish member of ObjectWeb. EMIC also started a small OSS portal under the same name of Continuent.

As expected in the pattern described in my previous post, EMIC sought venture capital (they are reaching step 4 of the pattern I proposed).

EMIC decided to host some of their projects licensed in BSD on a portal of their own, other LPGL'ed projects remaining on ObjectWeb (C-JDBC to begin with). This choice may dilute the efforts to some extent and be prjudicial to their own business in the long run. Building your own community is not that simple, and the pattern would probably better work if they decided to propose their projects to the ObjectWeb consortium.

ObjectWebCon '06 -- Call for Proposals Open

2005-10-27T16:46:00.000+02:00

The ObjectWebCon '06 CFP is open!

There are calls for:

presentations during parallel sessions (abstract due: November 21th, 2005, notification: starting December 5th, 2005)
candidates to the best use case awards (abstract due: November 21st, 2005, notification: Starting December 15th)

This years, teh best use cases will be selected by public vote (online vote: December 1-12). Don't forget to submit your use cases to run for an award!

http://objectwebcon06.objectweb.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/CFP

Bill Save our (French) Souls

2005-10-25T19:17:00.000+02:00

Peter Sayer just published a paper in InfoWorld about "Gates lend[ing] a hand to French developers".

It just made me think how small the world is. It's like the world is shrinking. Let's see... JBoss announced a partnership with Microsoft 2 weeks ago. As Peter noticed, JBoss CEO Marc Fleury is French. This spring, INRIA announced a partnership with Microsoft (in the news again these days). Yesterday Microsoft lended a hand to French developers. Well, thanks Mr Gates.

Gates -- is it a pun? Would you say the gatekeeper lends you a hand when he's reaching with his hand to insert the key in the bolt of your gate and lock it? Knowing Peter and his [British] humor, I'd not be surprised the pun was intended!

Petals JBI in the Press

2005-10-25T15:33:00.000+02:00

The Petals project, created in June and hosted by ObjectWeb since then, is in the news today.

The Petals services platform extends ObjectWeb ESB initiative with a JBI container as a core element to build standard based integration solutions. Built on top of Celtix, the project adopts a highly distributed integration approach, in which many JBI containers running on different Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) achieve location transparency via a JMS based transport layer. In a next step, the platform is expected to provide specialized B2B bindings enabling organizations to expand their information systems beyond their physical and business boundaries. Petals is supported by EBM WebSourcing (France) and Fossil E-Commerce (Brazil), two corporate members of ObjectWeb specialized in business integration technologies.

Massimo Pezzini, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner: "Thanks to web services, service oriented architecture is entering the mainstream and users are increasingly looking for standard-based, extensible enterprise service buses to support their SOA strategies. Therefore ESB technology will rapidly commoditize and open source will play a crucial role in terms of dramatically accelerating this trend."

InfoWorld, eWeek

JOnES Project Accepted

2005-10-24T18:43:00.000+02:00

The JOnES project has been selected by the French RNTL network. JOnES is a project submitted to RNTL so to help funding the development effort around a JBI based ESB framework.

JOnES is expected to provide significant contribution to the ObjectWeb ESB initiative activities, more specifically the Petals project.

Close collaboration b/w several ESBi actors: EBM WebSourcing, France Telecom R&D, Odonata, Open Wide, ScalAgent, integrators, users and research laboratories (Ecole des Mines)
It will contribute to valorize of INRIA R&D technologies (Fractal, Dream, GoTM) and integrate ObjectWeb components (JORAM, LeWYs, XQuare).

Demonstrators for integration and valorisation of the usage of components will be developed (Telco-oriented use case, cross-enterprises collaborative process and heterogeneous applications)

... Join Them!

2005-10-17T20:30:00.000+02:00

Talking to CBR, Marc Fleury (JBoss) mentionned the idea of JBoss joining ObjectWeb:

"As well as IBM, JBoss is also considering getting closer to the ObjectWeb Consortium, home to the rival JOnAS application server. "ObjectWeb has had JOnAS for a long time and it has been the focus to some degree," said Mr Fleury"

As ObjectWeb is quickly becoming the natural home-ground for open source middleware players, this would be a pretty natural move (and a significant recognition for ObjectWeb). The consortium is expanding fast (size doubles every year), is gaining significant traction (eg: in the SOA space) and is still open to all. ObjectWeb is undoubtedly a source for high-end technology. For a SMB such as JBoss Group who sells professional services, it would make a lot of sense to cut down R&D costs by leveraging existing open source projects and to benefit from business traction in the ecosystem.

Cheesy Details

2005-10-12T17:24:00.000+02:00

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 ;-)

INRIA: forum on ICT in Brazil

2005-10-12T17:04:00.000+02:00

INRIA (Paris) organized three days about ICT in Brazil. being in Paris today, I attended the afternoon session, with outstanding presentations from D.Petit & L. Marques (SOftex). Brazil spent $11.4 billion in 2005. 10% of the population is connected to the internet, with an objective of 40% in 2015. According to D. Petit, Brazil's bank system is the most advanced in the world. Due to the hyper-inflation that prevailed till 1994, the banks IT system got developped to take into account frequent and drastic modifications of the regulations and processes. The IT teams also acquired a culture of high flexibility and reactivity. e-government is a reality, as electronic ballots are used for most elections (president, governors, etc). This capacity helps ensure proper democracy process in a country where a part of the population lives in very remote areas. 97% of individuals fill their income tax declaration online, while 100% of companies do it online. Brazil counts over 200,000 It professionals. The average cost of a work hour is about $25-30, to be compared to a reference of $100/h in the US. The open source community is wide and vibrant. Brazil counts about 5,400 IT vendors (hardware, software, services).

ObjectWeb Architecture meeting -- Day 3

2005-10-05T18:07:00.000+02:00

Pr Wang presented Orientware, a consortium of Chinese companies who work on middleware development. Orientware middleware, which is not open source, relie on open standards (OMG, W3C, JCP). Their solutions include J2EE AS, portal, CCM, SOAP engine. Main contributors include Beihang university, Chinese academy of Science. Dr Bin Zhou presented a CORBA based WS engine. The presented mechanism (StarWebService) basically offers a way to expose objects in a CORBA domain as web services. It is an extension to Axis 1.0. They are university member of OMG, and also got involved in the open source movement one year ago (www.starmiddleware.net).

I missed a presentation from representatives of Unifor.

ObjectWeb Architecture Meeting - Day 2

2005-10-04T11:25:00.000+02:00

Morning Session:

Status on Public Funded Projects related to ObjectWeb

Pascal Moussier (INRIA/ObjectWeb Executive Committee) starts off the day by introducing the context of European Funded projects and presenting the NESSI technology platform, co-founded by ObjectWeb. The Framework Progemme is the European Union's main instrument for funding research and technology development. For FP6, the topicsof interest for ObjectWeb mainly is theme 2 (Information Society Technologies); for FP7 it'll be theme 3 (Information and Communication Technologies). In FP7, joint technology initiatives will be mainly embodied as European Technology Platforms. EU's goal is to invest 3% in R&D. Progess on the Libon agenda has been slow so far; after mid-term review, it has been decided to accelerate it.

NESSI is an ETP. First step, completed today, was to develop a vision document? Step 2, undergoing, is to define the strategic research agenda. Last step (and most important) will be the implementation of this agenda with existing EU funding instruments (IP, STREP, SSA, NoE, ...) NESSI aims to provide a unified view for European research in service architectures and software 60% of jobs created in Europe over the last 5 years were highly skills. High-knowledge employment was 3 times faster than average growth in more traditional sectors. ETPs such as NESSI are a pragmatic step in implementing EU i2010 policy so to make this trend sustainable in the long run. OSS is changing the overall economic balance; EU discovered that OSS is to be key to Europe too, and ObjectWeb is the only vibrant professional open-source community with large enough a scope in Europe (although floks such as MMBase do a tremendous job, at a more local level). EU aims at balancing the fact that, although 70% of OSS developers are from Europe, basically all well known OSS communities are North-American. It's worth noticing that IBM is involved in NESSI, considers that middleware should be open source and also considers that services should be treated as a scientific research domain (maybe this is connected to their IGS strategy).

Infrastructure: coherent virtualization, storage, network; a missing piece is infrastructure middleware. Service integration is SOA, (re)configuration. Semantics machine to machine communication, translation between business and technical language.

Transversal aspects are trust and security, quality and reliability, management services, interoperability and open standards.

NESSI is the last technology platform accepted by the commission (other were ENIAC, eMobility, NEM and Artemis). NESSI is to be software glue across all ETPs. Governance principles are organized around flexibility and openness. Key success factors include funding availability, critical mass (EU, global), good interactions, interoperability and open solutions and bridging the gap between research and industrial solutions. The final goal is not technology; it is impact. Estimated budget over the 7 years to come: 2.5 billion Euros. Expected impact is to contribute to create 250,000 jobs per year.

NESSI Roadmap: Oct 05: governance rules defined. Nov 05: meeting to enlarge the industrial circle. Jan 06: SRA v1 available. 2 SSA have been submitted so to help NESSI take off: NESSI-SOFT and NESSI-Grid (in which ObjectWeb is involved).

Pascal presented QualiPSo, a proposal for a 48 months IP involving ObjectWeb, OW members Engineering, Atos, Bull, Mandriva, Thales and 16 other companies and research labs from Europe, China and Brazil. QualiPSo is about investigating and implementing development processes including business models, methods and tools to foster wide adoption of Open Source Sofware. QualiPSo aims at linking existing communities together.

Alain Boulze (INRIA/ OW EC) presented Caraway, an FP6 SSA proposal related to the Artemis ETP. Caraway aims at jump starting an ecosystem around open standard basec open source platform for mission critical systems. The technical platform behind are to be CARDAMOM and OpenCCM, ObjectWeb projects implementing the CORBA Component Model. Alain presented the JOnES (Java open ESB) proposal targeting the development of an open source ESB framework compliant with JBI and leveraging existing ObjectWeb components. JOnES is a proposal submitted to the RNTL funding network. EBM Websourcing, Odonata, Open Wide, ScalAgent, France Telecom, ObjectWeb, Ecole des Mines are involved. Alain also presented the FedrID RNRT proposal. It targets implementation of a unified and simplified solution for identities federation with a focus on Liberty Alliance specifications for federated identities process management. Linagora, Thales IS Business One are involved.

Alain mentionned the S4All ITEA project, which started in July 2005 (an S4All private meeting to be held and co-located with

OW architecture meeting tommorrow in Grenoble, France). S4All has the vision of a world of services easy to create, to share, to use, and still user centric. The open source side of this project is to be handled under ObjectWeb's umbrella.

Alain also briefly presented Grid4Biz, a proposal for a STREP project. Grid4Biz targets grid technologies, systems and services and targets the development of a grid model for e-business and e-government applications. Asustria, China, France, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, UK involved).

Jose Remy (Secur.net) presented the SIHIS IP proposal. SIHIS involves 56 participants from 15 countries. SIHIS is about migrating complex legacy / proprietary systems to full open source. SOA and ESB play a key role in this endeavour. The first 18 months are bout software development. During the next 18 months, real world applications will e created in the healthcare sector.

I briefly presented EO SSA. EO SSA aims to facilitate and support the development of open source communities in Europe. Telvent, Zenc, MMBase Foundation, Telefonica I+D, Interaction Design, Philips, ObjectWeb are involved.

Rafael Marins (Fossil EC) presented a request submitted in Brazil to help fund the development of the ObjectWeb Petals project.

ESB initiative

Alain Boulze introduced the ESBi workshop. ESBi is not about building a single project, but to share technical expertise, promote a way of thinking and, eventually, foster the adoption of open-source technology and of open standards in the industry and public administration. The initiative has been formally kicked off on October 4th, 2004 in Parid la Defense, France.

Alain gave a brief overview of JBI. Two new projects in the ESB initiative: Celtix and Petals. Celtix is lead by Iona. It is intended to be a Java ESB using standards and SOA. M1 available. Petals is the result of the merge of two proposal that had been submitted to ObjectWeb to implement a JBI container. Co-lead by EBM WebSourcing and Fossil EC, Petals targets implementation of a distributed JBI container, along with B2B oriented binding components (EDIINT AS, OdetteFTP, etc). Proof of concept release August 2005. In Eclipse, the Eclipse STP proposal is under review. ObjectWeb and Ioan are PMC member, Sybase is lead. Open Wide also proposed to create Eclipse JWT (Java Workflow Tool).

ESBi representatives were at the Integration Summit this year. IC being nonprofit, focused on integration and real-world/user oriented, ObjectWeb ESBi have opportunities to seek synergies with some IC committees (SOA, RFID, OASIS, Synergy, ...) Ecosystem federated by ESBi: S4All, JOnES (if accepted), Fractal, Dream, GoTM, JORAM JMS, LeWYS, XQuark...

Christophe Loridan (Bull) gave an overview of BSOA, Bull SOA project. For two years, Bull has been working on integrating ObjectWeb projects (JOnAS, Bonita, eXo Platform) and Eclipse tooling (mainly WTP). The principles is a collaborative architecture, an emphazise on tools and models, and leveraging of JOnAS. Bonita has been significantly improved, as far as performances. Proprietary complements has been developped. A proprietary BPEL 1.1 engine has been developped by Bull, with persistent and non persistent modes and transport abstraction (to accomodate other transports than web services). Next steps will cover integrating a JBI bus and binding components and an Event-driven architecture. Bull is evaluating Celtix, Petals, ServiceMix and Axis2. Christophe explained that ESB fits well within ObjectWeb and ESBi & BSOA have a natural fit in knowledge sharing.

Afternoon Session: ESB Initiative cont'd

Eric Samson presented XCalia Intermediation Platform. XCalia here presents as a consumer of ObjectWeb projects. XIM leverages ObjectWeb components in the XCalia intermediation core. After reusing OW components, XCalia (formely Libelis) now proposes to contribute some for its proprietary code to ObjectWeb (Jalisto, Navilis). XIP packages JORAM, JOTM, Tomcat, Axis and connectors from (formerly) Librados. As for ESB, Eric finds there are many projects in ObjectWeb -- maybe too many of them. They are evaluating OW ESBi, Mule, ServiceMix, etc. Eric: "sounds like in the open source world, people like having at least two projects doing the same thing" :) A major criterion for selecting the project to use would be ease of integration within XIP; the JBI compliance; maturity, stability, performance, scalability. Very interesting ideas in JOnES: the fact it's a toolbox, not a packaged platform (and this because XCalia wants to integrate it, not reuse it as a product).

Carl Trieloff (Iona) presented the Celtix project and Iona's open source strategy, including their involvement in the Eclipse SOA Tools Platform. Opportunities to work with Celtix include: certifying Celtix with JORAM and JOnAS (incl. test suites, also replacement of Axis 1.1 in JOnAS by Celtix / Axis 2); creating additional transports (Dream, Sync4j); integrating Enhydra, Groovy, XQuark; and contributing to tools (contact: celtix-dev at objectweb.org). Celtix M1 supports SOAP 1.1, and will support 1.2 soon. Celtix brings a distributed bus: bus is the core of all Celtix components (logical bus extends outside the process boundaries); configuration domains can span across any umber of machines. There's a lightweight mechanism for adding, deploying and installing services. Celtix is extensible at all levels. Celtix supports a notion of container unrelated to JBI, and defined earlier than JSR 208.

Rafael Marins (Fossil EC) and Gael Blondelle (EBM Websourcing) gave a presentation about Petals. Petals' goal is to provide a lightweight service oriented platform based on JBI. Petals defined a specific project governance, with PMC, development by tasks, committers voting... A first release candidate is planned for end of November 2005. Petals is anticipated to provide ready-to-use solutions, e.g. transformation, logging, routing features, also B2B features. Synergy with Celtix is under consideration. The Petals team would contribute to Eclipse STP. The JOnES project, if accepted, would help growing the communityy and ecosystem around Petals. Petals is intended to be distributed container, build on existing ObjectWeb components: Fractal, Dream, JORAM, XQuare, Lewys.

ObjectWeb Architecture Meeting Q405 - Day 1

2005-10-03T17:06:00.000+02:00

The Q405 ObjectWeb Architecture meeting started today at 2:30PM at INRIA's facility. Here's a quick report of some sessions I attended.

Alcatel gave a presentation about an IMS application server -- which I unfortunately missed.

Gaël Blondelle (EBM WebSourcing) presented basics of the SIP protocol. SIP is an asynchronous, even-driven protocol. He argued there's a need for an application layer framework on top of SIP servlets as a key element for an industrial approach to SIP application development. Adding SIP in the Java world brings extra requirements beyond the simple level of functionality provided by SIP servlets. A question is: is there a need for integration between such a JBI framework and a J2EE appserv. Is it a matter of convergence, or integration through WE or ESB? Although distribution may be nice from a conceptual perspective, a more integrated platform might make sense for performance reasons. France Telecom R&D is working on a SIP servlet container for JOnAS in order to lead experimentations about convergence of the two technologies. They are open to initiating collaboration on an open source ObjectWeb project in this area when other members feel interest in open source middleware for the telco.

Bruno Dillenseger (France Telecom R&D) presented CLIF, an ObjectWeb project for load injection and performance benchmarking. CLIF works with the notion of "scenarios", with behavior modeling user interactions, and load profiles to manage the number of instances. CLIF is extensible with a mechanism of plug-ins. There are plug-ins for HTTP, DNS, etc. CLIF will investigate leveraging Eclipse TPTP probes.

CNRS joins ObjectWeb

2005-10-03T10:43:00.000+02:00

The French National Center for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS) joins ObjectWeb. From the beginning, CNRS teams were actively involved in the work of the community, but CNRS itself was not a member of the consortium. The membership agreement between ObjectWeb and CNRS makes this involvement official and allows all CNRS laboratories to be more present in the evolution of the consortium.

Along with CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission), CNRS and INRIA recently acknowledged the importance of open source software by creating together an open source license, called Cecill , which is in conformance with French law, while perfectly suited to international projects.

More here.

ObjectWeb Celtix M1 Released

2005-09-20T15:49:00.000+02:00

The Celtix development team today announced the availability of the first Milestone of the project. Milestone 1 consists of first end-to-end running version with a subset of the release 1.0 planned features.

"Embedded" Business Model Illustrated

2005-09-19T18:46:00.000+02:00

Just got a new Archos PMA 400. It's a full Linux enabled computer that fits in your pocket, comes with plenty of nice I/O such as video input, TV connectivity, Wifi, USB, touch screen and 30 GB hard drive. Plays MP3 and DivX, can be used as an external drive for your computer, storage for your digital camera on the go, ... Linux/Qtopia inside. Typicall "embedded" business model: the architecture is similar to that of a Sharp Zaurus, the operating system is open source, along with most of built-in applications, and you can download plenty of extra goodies from the Internet. Archos does not have to develop the software (except for bug fixing), but focuses on hardware. A lot of fun indeed!

IBM Java ESB Announced

2005-09-14T21:25:00.000+02:00

IBM announced a lightweight, Java-based ESB. Big [B/G]lue already has a low-end J2EE appserver in its pocket.

Dave Chappell: "They're trying to ride the fence here," he said. "In the past they've tried to help customers squint the right way to see an ESB in the products that they already have. Yet now they've finally built one of their own and admitted it really is a product category."

How long till IBM selects an open source ESB to add to its catalog? Any candidates?

Open Source Bubble Ahead?

2005-09-14T19:22:00.000+02:00

While discussing with a consultant recently, I told him a little about the recent history of some projects in the open source middleware realm. I was struck by an recurrent trend, something he called a "pattern". Yep, this is a business [design] pattern.

I'll refrain from mentioning names so to avoid frustrating people. People frustrated from NOT getting the names can always try to drop me a line, but with no guarantee.

The pattern is roughly the following:

identify a software technology that cumulates: emerging standards + fragmented commercial marketplace + few existing open source projects (enough to make sure there's some interest, not enough to make the technology outdated or commoditized)
make yourself a name in an open source community. Start a project targeting the technology that you selected. Become the lead of the project, make sure you have friends at key committer positions (beer required)
when you have sufficient grassroot control over the project, start up a company. Choose one of the well-documented business models to build a business case for your company
Leverage your control over the project to convince VCs. Inject funding in PR and make your company well hyped
when the company has burnt almost all its cash, find someone else to buy it (suit and tie, no beer). Alternately, go public.

Deja vu? Similarities with the .com era are striking. But although this pattern is not really new, but it has a couple of rather interesting specificities:

grassroot communities are used as a springboard for individuals. This means that the better the community is known, the more successful the operation. "Fascination with the brand" is likely to be an unwanted effect in the medium term
for the VC / investor, the situation is rather uncommon. Usually, investors are fond of buying the company and firing all the management team after a while. The deal is different if the management team is made of key committers that are well connected in the community. Better buy them a life insurance and never let them all fly on the same plane

They might make the difference, they might not. I will not jump to any conclusion so far...

Reinventing the Wheel

2005-09-14T14:24:00.000+02:00

I started an entry about "reinventing the wheel" a few weeks ago but got no time to ellaborate, so I prefered to withhold it. I hope this time it'll be little clearer. My decision to publish this little entry is triggered by the appearance in 01 Informatique, a French magazine specialized in IT, of a paper written by Fred Bordage. I won't translate it entirely (it'll be illegal and time consuming). Just an excerpt for non-French readers: "Amongst major providers of infrastructure software, Oracle and Microsoft are the only ones not to be involved in an open source ESB project. The two main initiatives - Celtix and Synapse - relie almost 100% on code coming from proprietary ESB". Then comes a table comparing the ESB pojects of various communities. Although the core of the article is well thought in my opinion, I consider the comparison between various projects is somewhat misleading.

Over 1 year ago, ObjectWeb announced an "ESB initiative". Then after, we heard of Mule, then of Celtix, then of ServiceMix, then of Synapse, etc. James Strachan wrote "it's been busy in the open source world lately", and, as a joke, I would add "yes, busy reinventing the wheel". Another way to put it would be to speak of "more choice for the user", to chant "competition is good for innovation", etc.

What are We Talking About?

Two things are to be kept in mind. First, not every body agrees on "what an enterprise service bus (ESB) is" (see note below). We're not yet even close to it, although some writers, David Chappell to begin with, give their own very inspiring vision of the meaning of this concept. Second, until recently, there was no decent open standard to give hints about what an ESB could be. In the Java world, JBI became an approved JCP specification on June 20, 2005.

Then, the comparison between open source projects cannot be done in a meaningful way without taking the communities structure into account. Apache (historically the first) is a meritocracy run by individuals. The foundation has very little control over the project life, except for making sure operations comply with the bylaws. All business aspects are kept outside of the foundation. ObjectWeb (second in time) is a consortium of companies and individuals. Things may happen slower than in a purely grassroot individual-driven community, because business agendas have to be taken into account. Creating an ecosystem is a goal. My uderstanding of CodeHaus is that it's closer to Apache in its stucture, but only accepts mature projects. I may be mistaken here, but my feeling is that incubation is mainly done outside CodeHaus, the accepted projects being already mature. This is a little bias that tends to give the impression that CodeHaus projects come clean-cut right out of the blue as if developers were coding in no time at all.

History

In June 2004, ObjectWeb launched the "ESB initiative". Because nobody agreed on what an ESB is, we called it an initiative, not a project. The goal was to bring together people working on integration related topics, targeting the creation not of one open source ESB, but of a toolbox for creating ESBs. The second reason for following this rationale was due to the goal of ObjectWeb to develop an ecosystem. Because not two agree on what an ESB is, there's plenty of room for companies to differenciate. If ObjectWeb, as a consortium, had promoted a single ESB, the consortium would have competed against its own members. In June 2004, ObjectWeb already had very stable and mature code to inject in the "ESB initiative". Only one example: JORAM, a message-oriented-middleware led by ScalAgent, was stable for years, and at this time, already had JMS, SOAP and J2ME connectors. Was it an ESB? Not really, but it definitely was a good start.

Some companies developed commercial offers based on ObjectWeb ESBi components. One example: XCalia put on the market an intermediation platform called XIM and built on JORAM (and the JOnAS J2EE application server, for that matter). Should it be called an ESB? According to XCalia, the concept of ESB may not be well suited to the European market, for many reasons, including the strong habit of making taylor-made solutions -- as opposed to using off-the-shelves products. This may help explaining why not everybody is so sure about "what an ESB is".

A New Kid on the Block

Then Celtix entered the game and, because of Iona's impressive track record in integration, the press tended to equate "Celtix" with "ObjectWeb ESB". There's no denying that Celtix is a major contribution and that Iona's support is a major milestone in the history of ObjectWeb's ESBi. But I think there are 3 misunderstandings:

Celtix is part of ESBi, but it is not the only project in ObjectWeb's integration toolbox
Celtix should not be seen as a low-end version of Artix. Iona's investing in building a community and in creating innovative code too.
in ObjectWeb's ecosystem, full-fledged ESBs are to be found in the vendors catalog, because it is the way they can create value out of the toolbox. When technology matures, an increasing part of the software stack will fall in ObjectWeb's roster of components. And this is what's happening with JBI. Now that the specification exists, open source projects will converge and find synergies to implement this standard, so to limit dupplication of efforts (or reinvention of the wheel) and let commercial vendors concentrate on innovation and added value. Something similar is expected to happen in Eclipse, with the Eclipse SOA Platform. Such tools will complement ObjectWeb toolbox of integration / SOA projects.

Reinventing the Wheel?

Coming back to Fred's article and the comparison between open source ESB projects. What are we comparing here? ESBs? probably not, as not all agree on a definition (Synapse, for instance, is not clearly refered to as an ESB, more as a SOA/WS framework). JBI-compliant projects? The spec only appeared in late June '05, so any reference to earlier version is meaningless. Projects? Do we mean incubated, under development, stable, feature-complete, and what's the status of an "initiative"? Do we take into account the commercial offers build on top?

Fred, let me re-write the entry about ObjectWeb according to this new perspective:

Initiative name: ObjectWeb ESBi
Community: ObjectWeb
Companies involved: EBM WebSourcing, Fossil E-Commerce, INRIA, Iona, Odonata, Open Wide, Orbeon, ScalAgent, and more that I don't remember from the top of my head (apologies).
Publication date for v1.0: somewhere between 1999 and 2002 (?)
Core technolgy: technology transfer from fundamental research + development from scratch + [more to come]...

IMHO, the conclusion of Fred's article is valid though: convergence is to be anticipated between various projects. Because depending on the circumstances, reinventing the wheel either makes sense or only dilutes efforts.

And a Parting Word of Humor: so what does ESB mean anyway? In New York, it means the Empire State Building. Star Wars fans understand "the Empire strikes back". And in France, until recently, ESB was only known as short for "Encephalopathie Spongiforme Bovine", or bovine spongiform encephalopathy!

COSGov Conference

2005-09-14T13:29:00.000+02:00

Only two weeks to the COSGov Conference in Hanoi, Vietnam (September 28-30, 2005).

In 2004, the Vietnamese Government has identified Open Source as a way not only to reinforce the national software infrastructure required for efficient governance, but also to give a new chance for Vietnam to master this infrastructure and incubate a national software industry.
In its first edition, the COSGov Vietnam Conference will focus on building cooperation in the field of open-source for eGovernance.

Unfortunately, I won't attend it -- and will miss opportunities to meet folks there. But some of these folks may come to the next ObjectWeb architecture meeting. Congrats to the COSGov organizers -- and a special salute to those who work just next door from my office and that have proved very dedicated to making it happen!

CeCILL Waiting for OSI Approval

2005-09-12T19:53:00.000+02:00

CeCILL, the open source license cooked by CEA/INRIA/CNRS has been submitted to OSI for approval. CeCILL, originally written in French, now has an English translation that has the same legal value. According to recent posts on the license-discuss mailing list, CeCILL "is in the pile of licenses awaiting the next OSI board meeting for official disposition."

It'd be great that a license from European background get OSI blessing!

Funny enough, the big topic these days on the OSI mailing lists is... license proliferation! Choice is good, but too much choice may be difficult to deal with, especially from the user perspective. In the case of CeCILL, the idea was not to create yet-another-license, but simply to create an open source license that would comply for some national regulatory requirements. As open source gets increasing recognition around the world, as governments promote the use of open source in public administrations, and as all players get more cautious about IP issues, my personnal bet is that we're not gonna see the end of license proliferation soon -- simply because laws and regulations differ from country to country.

Iona Joins Eclipse and Proposes SOA platform

2005-09-12T12:36:00.000+02:00

Iona is joining Eclipse as a Strategic Developer, and joins the Eclipse Foundation board. Iona also submitted the top-level SOA tooling project. This project will nicely complement the work done in the framework of ObjectWeb's ESB initiative, Celtix and other SOA related projects.

Christophe Ney, executive director of ObjectWeb, will be in the initial PMC of the project.

JBoss Wiki: Neutrality Benefits Illustrated?

2005-09-12T12:06:00.000+02:00

JBoss announced its alpha version of "JBoss wiki". This may be little more than the announcement of yet-another-wiki (wikis are probably the area where the choice is the largest in the open source world). About 9 months ago, JBoss announced "JBoss federation", an attempt to federate open source projects in a JBoss centric ecosystem. 9 months later, JBoss federation counts 9 members. One of these members is ObjectWeb XWiki , which directly competes with JBoss wiki. Another is LifeRay, a JSR168 portal server that directly competes with JBoss portal.

NESSI Kicked-Off Today in Brussels, Belgium

2005-09-07T12:20:00.000+02:00

Leading players from the software, telecommunication and services industry (Atos Origin, BT, Engineering, HP, IBM, Nokia, ObjectWeb, SAP, Siemens, Software AG, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, and Thales) announced today at the Crowne Plaza Europa, Brussels that they have joined forces to launch the Networked European Software and Services Initiative (NESSI).

NESSI is a European Technology Platform created by thirteen leading players to develop a visionary strategy for software and services driven by a common European Research Agenda.

Viviane Reding, EU ,Commissioner for Information Society and Media, said: “I very much welcome this NESSI initiative, and the commitment shown by its partners to develop a common services platform. This has the potential to strengthen Europe’s competitiveness in many economic sectors, and is another very practical step in implementing our i2010 policy for growth and jobs in Europe.”

During the Lisbon summit, in March 2000, the EU Heads of States and Governments agreed to make the EU "the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010". The Commission presented its mid-term review of the Lisbon agenda in February 2005. The recent report from the High Level Group chaired by the former Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok reported that progress towards achieving these objectives has been slow. Information and communication technologies (ICT) has an important role to play in the next five years. ICT were identified as playing a key role as they contribute to achieving the Lisbon goals primarily by two means: by driving the transformation of the European economy towards a dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy; because ICT is an important sector in its own right.

NESSI is certainly not about philanthropy – and NESSI is also not about European funding. The 13 founding members have already invested in NESSI, and are committed to pursuing this investment. The real goal of NESSI is to support an overall infrastructure that will enable all industries to optimize their resources by providing new services that will be immediately available, that can easily plug-in in secure, open and dependable environments.

To achieve the full scope of NESSI, the total investment is estimated to 2 billion Euros, of which the industries would to provide 1 billion Euros over the next 7 years.

NESSI states open source software as a key element of the vision. Open source is a process, not a product. It is a proven way to perform shared R&D, to develop excellent software, to enable the sustainable development of a service based economy and to meet governmental requirements such as technology independence in sensitive contexts. Opportunities to develop profitable business models exist all along the open source software value chain, and many of the participating companies are already working in the area of open source software.

OSGi Conference and Projects

2005-09-05T16:34:00.000+02:00

ObjectWeb is supporting sponsor of the OSGi Alliance 2005 Developer Forum & World Congress, which will take place on October 11-14, 2005 in Paris, France.

The following ObjectWeb members will speak in 6 presentations: Richard Hall (Univ. of Grenoble, ObjectWeb College of Architects), Mikael Desertot (Univ. of Grenoble), Didier Donsez (Univ. of Grenoble), Stephane Frenot (INRIA), Clement Escoffier (Univ. of Grenoble). They all contribute to ObjectWeb OSGi related work, including the OSCAR project.

On July 21, 2005, I read an entry in Sylvain Wallez's blog announcing that "Alex Karasulu invited the Oscar project to join the ASF". I posted a comment on Sylvain's blog. On August 26, I also answered to a post on the Oscar-dev mailing list on Apache's Incubator.

Quoting the message: "Now if they [ObjectWeb] really have a problem with what's happening, it's up to them to react. So let's move on!"

Quoting my answer: "We (ObjectWeb) brought up the subject of OSCAR "moving" to Apache weeks ago, if not months. [...]

OSCAR has been hosted at ObjectWeb for some time now. Rick, the project leader, also has been hosted by consortium members. [...] Definitely the OSCAR-OW relationship has extended beyond 'infrastructure'.

Nothing prevents contributors to Apache projects to also contribute to ObjectWeb projects. We grant access to any committer a project leader choses, regardless of their affiliation. In addition, OSCAR is under a BSD license. This means that Apache projects can take dependencies on OSCAR without compromizing ASF's license policy. [...]

The best way to go would probably be to find a solution where a single project would benefit from the support of the two communities (Apache & ObjectWeb). Maybe the notion of 'sister projects' would apply here: Apache OSCAR would mirror the existing ObjectWeb OSCAR.

Here, we have an opportunity to let our two communities work together. I think we should seize this opportunity for everybody's benefit."

Omar Tazi Now with Oracle

2005-09-05T16:27:00.000+02:00

Omar Tazi, fomerly Orbeon CEO, is now with Oracle as Chief Open Source Evangelist. Omar let Orbeon join ObjectWeb and contribute the PresentationServer project to the consortium. Omar also has a very interesting blog that I hope he'll continue to write. He gave a keynote at Eclipse World in NYC.

JBI Project at ObjectWeb

2005-09-05T15:50:00.000+02:00

The Petals services platform will provide a clustered implementation of a Java Business Integration (JSR208) container as a core element to build lightweight open source ESB solutions, leveraging existing components from ObjectWeb’s ESB initiative.

Unlike other JBI projects, Petals will target a distributed integration approach, in which JBI containers running on different Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) are interconnected to extend across the organization overcoming physical and business boundaries.

Petals targets integration with JOnAS and with Celtix. All details are not worked out yet, but where there's a will, there's a way!

A first prototype is available on ObjectWeb’s Forge. It embeds JORAM, ObjectWeb’s message oriented middleware used for JMS support in JOnAS.

Synapse Business Models According to Gartner

2005-09-02T17:03:00.000+02:00

Massimo Pezzini, Gartner, in Apache Synapse Project Shows Impact of Open-Source Approach:

"Most of the Synapse partners will likely integrate its technology into their products and pursue a traditional license-based business model. However, a few will try to develop a service-and-support business similar to that of JBoss. [...] The Synapse product offering will initially be targeted at providing an embeddable ESB core that the partners can extend with proprietary capabilities or integrate into their “closed source” products."

The licensed-based business model is definitely a straightforward option. The fact that open source code under Apache Public License can be injected into proprietary platforms so ISVs get traditional license revenues is usually refered to as a "business friendly" feature of this license.

The service-and-support model is, IMHO, less obvious. The JBoss model relies on the use of LGPL to avoid competitors to recycle open source code to fuel their own proprietary offering. The other key point in the JBoss model is the stranglehold one single company reatins on the project roadmap and on key committers.

Open Source the Corporate Way

2005-09-01T16:56:00.000+02:00

Cape Clear's CEO: "All successful open-source initiatives that I can think of originate in the public domain" (Celtix mentionned as an example of failure, less than two months after the project has been incepted!)

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Tomcat, Ant: started at Sun then donated to Apache.
Open Office: started at StarOffice, bought by Sun, then open sourced
Mozilla: started by Netscape, then open sourced in 1998 as Mozilla, eventually gave birth to FireFox
MySQL: owned and sponsored by a single for-profit firm
OpenCascade: developed as proprietary CASCADE by Matra, then open sourced
...

Geronimo Not Certified?

2005-08-29T18:38:00.000+02:00

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."

Right to Reply

2005-08-26T13:21:00.000+02:00

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.

Economic Perspective on Open Source Middleware

2005-08-22T17:16:00.000+02:00

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.

Conspiracy Theory, Explained

2005-08-19T16:11:00.000+02:00

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?

2005-08-19T15:21:00.000+02:00

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

2005-08-19T14:28:00.000+02:00

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.

2nd Day at LinuxWorld

2005-08-11T00:26:00.000+02:00

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.

Feeling Glue

2005-08-10T14:45:00.000+02:00

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."

First day at LinuxWorld, San Francisco

2005-08-09T23:50:00.000+02:00

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

PR budget for Open Source projects

2005-08-02T15:47:00.000+02:00

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!

What's Middleware Anyway?

2005-07-29T16:07:00.000+02:00

I had a "back to basics" attack today and franctically started surfing the web to find a definitive, comprehensive and convincing definition of "middleware". OK, ObjectWeb has its own definition, formulated after Sacha Krakowiak's work. But well, I was looking for something more matter-of-fact.

I ended up reading a proposal that the US Attorney General, Microsoft, and nine US states agreed upon to settle the antitrust trial led against Microsoft in 2001.

Here's the definition of "non Microsoft middleware" provided in the document:

"'Non-Microsoft Middleware' means a non-Microsoft software product running on a Windows Operating System Product that exposes a range of functionality to ISVs through published APIs, and that could, if ported to or made interoperable with, a non-Microsoft Operating System, thereby make it easier for applications that rely in whole or in part on the functionality supplied by that software product to be ported to or run on that non-Microsoft Operating System."

Well, I think I'll try to find out what's middleware another day...

Upcoming Talk at LinuxWorld San Francisco 05

2005-07-27T16:19:00.000+02:00

ObjectWeb will hold a booth (# 2056) in the .org pavillion at Linux World, San Fransisco, CA, USA, on August 9-11, 2005! I will also deliver a talk at 1PM on August 9, 2005:

Middleware the open-source way: technical superiority and business opportunities for the digital age

"Middleware is the new frontier for open source and brings opportunities to contain costs, to focus on innovative engineering, to find new sources of revenue and to go to market with unique competitive advantages. With members in about 80 countries and a team of 400 committers, ObjectWeb is a fast-growing, nonprofit organization that focuses on high-quality open source middleware. For example, JOnAS from ObjectWeb was the first open source application server developed in a nonprofit way to achieve J2EE certification. The benefits of open standard compliant, production-grade middleware is made available to everyone as an alternative, or as a complement, to proprietary solutions.

In this presentation, you’ll learn how open source players come together to build an ecosystem where users find high quality software and professional services. Case studies of open-source middleware deployed in production in government, healthcare, financial institutions and more will demonstrate that, however hidden, open source middleware is now a mainstream option that you should consider too."

Swpat Drama as an American Issue

2005-07-22T16:03:00.000+02:00

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1838419,00.asp: "As the Apache Software Foundation, Microsoft Corp. and IBM sort out licensing issues around making the WS-Security specification open-source-friendly, the issue becomes something of a precedent for how Web services specifications will evolve in the open-source world."

"The rapid growth of open-source business models and their distinct licensing requirements pose a challenging problem of adaptability for all standards bodies. Apache's conversation with IBM and Microsoft reveals that a lot more creative work needs to be done to harmonize traditional patent policy frameworks with the new business models to protect all parties from legal risk, while allowing for implementation of standards under the open-source development and licensing models."

A complex way to go. An easier way is to rule out software patents!

Swpats Directive Rejected by EP

2005-07-06T14:34:00.000+02:00

Just learnt the directive on "computer implemented inventions" (aka software patent directive) has been rejected altogether by the European Parliament (648 votes against, 14 for, 18 abstentions).

Thanks to this decision, the European industry is not immediatly jeopardized by software patents, and open source based innovation can keep thriving in Europe.

Libre Software Meeting

2005-07-05T23:31:00.000+02:00

I gave a presentation about ObjectWeb at the Libre Software Meeting. LSM is a community event organized on a volunteer basis. As we did for the last years, someone from ObjectWeb organized and chaired the "middleware" track. I was the one this year.

Guillaune Sauthier, JOnAS committer and member of the JOnAS core team, gave a technical, although high-level, presentation of JOnAS. Coming soon: the replication of stateful EJBs for failover purposes (in the next version of JOnAS); JORAM high availability and load balancing; JSR88 based deployment wizzard (codename Dolphin); EMB support; automated cluster monitoring and autonomous configuration (JOnAS 5?). Target date for JOnAS 5: alpha by end of 2005, first release 1H 2006.

An online questionaire is available for community to provide feedback and express wishes for JOnAS 5.

Stephane Traumat presented a case study/best practices about the development of a complex J2EE application.

Stephane is currently co-authoring a book about JOnAS titled "JOnAS Live" to be published by SourceBeat soon.

Luis Aris presented XWiki, an ObjectWeb project. XWiki is more than an application; it also is a middleware platform that can be used to develop applications... such as a wiki! XWiki is the first wiki to be supported with professional services. Appart from being a geeky gimmick, wikis are a simple yet efficient collaborative tool, eg to incite developers to document their work. XWiki is used by EADS, IRCAD, NEC France, Mandriva, MForma... The XWiki.com hosting facility totalizes about 3500 wikis to date. XWiki allows the development of applications inside the wiki, with Grrovy or Velocity. XWiki benefits from Google's "Summer of Code" ($2 million alloted to a selection of open source projects) for 7 mini projects. XWiki currently is GPL; may become LGPL soon (industrials such as EADS do not like GPL for obvious reasons).

During the cocktail reception, given at the city hall, learnt from F. Couchet (APRIL) that the directive about software patent was about to be rejected by the European Parliament.

Nice walk into the beautiful city of Dijon then dinner with other delegates, from various communities.

Geronimo is Certified

2005-06-30T10:52:00.000+02:00

Tadam! Welcome to Geronimo in the club of certified open source J2EE implementations!

Quoting geronimo-dev mailing list: "The Apache Geronimo team is proud to announce that as of Wednesday, June 29, 2005 at 9:17:07.002 PM PDT Apache Geronimo passes the J2EE TCK 1.4.1a test suite."

Geronimo is the fourth certified open source J2EE to join the club. The team's initial goal was to be certified on August 6, 2004. It was (I assume purposedly) very ambitious -- but they did make it less than one year later. IBM support probably helped a little. Good job. Now that there are 4 open-source options, J2EE is becoming commodity for real!

Oh yes, the killer detail: the announcement happened rigth in the middle of Geir's BoF -- damn, I wish I was there. I knew I should have gone to J1 (but I had too much work actually): "The tests were completed by the Geronimo team just 12 minutes before Geir Magnusson began his 9:30pm BOF on the Apache Geronimo project at Java One..." This is some timing...

Software Patents

2005-06-30T09:29:00.000+02:00

David Berlind recently covered (in his blog), the subject of (*cough* software) patents from a North American viewpoint.

This is damn interesting to read this, when at the same time, the war for/against software patents is raging here in Europe.

Excerpts:

"Assuming that we ditched patents here in the U.S., everything would be fine, right? No patents, no lawsuits. That is, until you head into international territory (and the world has not demonstrated a proclivity towards following America's lead). So, while the spirit of never using a patent offensively may eventually prevail in the U.S., what the open source world has taught us is that patents actually come in handy for defensive purposes where that spirit may not exist (for example, in the EU)."

Hmmm. Seen from Europe, the picture looks slightly different. It sounds that due to GATT/TRIPS treaty, the question of making software patentable in Europe is back on the table. So far software was not considered an invention according to European law -- and for this reason, was not patentable. At least, in theory. In practice, patent offices where more and more disposed to grant patent on just about anything (for non French readers, the link points to a paper that summarize a study I presented about the risks of blindly giving credit to a cryptographic system because it's patented). A new directive has been proposed 2 years ago, has been heavily admended by the European Parliament, then purely wiped out by the European Council and replaced by a brand new proposal with none of the admendments. Europe definitely seem to walk in the US steps on this matter.

"Said Perens in his commentary: 'At least the Europeans get to have a debate. In the United States, software and business method patenting is the result of two court decisions. And Americans have yet to get started on legislation to solve the problem.'"

Sure we have a debate. But who cares? Definitely not the Council. Does the Parliament?

Sun Acquires SeeBeyond

2005-06-29T15:08:00.000+02:00

So here's what Sun had in mind...

Answering Jason Stamper's questions, CapeClear's David Clarke, VP of products, declared: "It is unlikely we will contribute to [the Celtix] project. We see this as a knee-jerk reaction to the assumption that because there is an open source application server (JBoss) there is a market for an open source ESB, but we see them as very different markets."

Even though one can doubt there would ever be a "market" for open source software (remember, the theory of free market and perfect competition assumes that goods are sold, which happends to not be the case for most open source projects), at least there are today two major open source players that believe the time is right for making open source ESB happen...

Sun will now be facing two harsh dillemmas:

be faithful to open source and give up license revenues on SeeBeyond technologies, or milk the proprietary cow and look poorly credible on the Open ESB front -- or find a middle term, somewhere...
push Java, JBI and Open ESB, and be embarrassed by non-Java SeeBeyond technos, or acknowledge there's a life after Java, and put Open ESB in a rather difficult position -- or have a finger in each pie...

The problem for Sun here is the classical issue of a commercial vendor that at the same time hosts a collaborative, nonprofit (eg open source) endeavor, and may have clear conflicts of interest with potential contributors to this endeavor.

LSM Track on InfraSoft

2005-06-29T14:33:00.000+02:00

We just finalized the programme of the "infrastructure software" track for the Libre Software Meeting to be held in Dijon, France, on July 5-9, 2005:

Tuesday July 5, 2005

2:00PM – François Letellier, INRIA/ObjectWeb – Sustainable debvelopment of open source software infrastructures
2:50PM – Guillaume Sauthier, Bull – JOnAS, open source J2EE appserver
4:00PM – Stéphane Traumat, Scub – Developing with J2EE: architecture, methodology, tools
4:50PM – Luis Arias, XWiki – XWikian open source Java wiki

Friday July 8, 2005

2:00PM – Jerome Moliere, author and J2EE expert – Chosing an open source J2EE server
2:50PM – Sébastien Bahloul, Linagora – InterLDAP, open source identity federation project
4:00PM – Marc Bouchet, Xcalia – An intermediation platform based on open source components
4:50PM – Julien Forest, Artenum – LibreSource, open source platform for collaborative development

4:00PM – Pierre-Yves Gibello, Experlog (ObjectWeb board member) - will sit in a round table about "free servers and public services"

See you there!

Sun and Open Source Enterprise Java

2005-06-28T12:40:00.000+02:00

Sun today announced at JavaOne two open source projects: Glassfish (open source version of its J2EE appserv) and Open ESB, an open source implementation of JBI. They already have the code base for the first, they are calling for contributors to the latter.

This may look like a strange way of doing things, doesn't it? ObjectWeb's ESBi has been around and public for over 1 year now. Does Sun suffer from NIH syndrom? This is very unlikely. Sun has long been a supporter of community efforts.

The deal here more likely is for Sun to try to capture the ESB market and steer it towards Java. But business integration obviously goes beyond Java -- be in in the .Net or "legacy" worlds. The whole purpose of ObjectWeb ESBi is to remain open and to target the creation of a toolbox of components, some for Java platforms, some for non Java ones. With a long history in interop, Iona (lead of the newly incepted ObjectWeb Celtix project) has the expertise required to contribute to open-source or commercial solutions for cross platform integration.

Something a Sun-hosted, Java centric Open ESB may have a hard time to achieve. It'd make sense that Sun and ObjectWeb join their forces and find complementarities.

Steve Garone on ObjectWeb Celtix

2005-06-25T17:25:00.000+02:00

Steve Garone, Vice President and Senior Analyst, Ideas International: "Customers are increasingly moving toward services-based approaches to building new IT architectures and applications. Because of this, they are coming to realize that the traditional hub and spoke, proprietary, EAI approaches to integration very often does not truly meet their requirements and they are demanding alternatives. ESBs are becoming increasingly popular, and with Celtix, an open source Java ESB, IONA and ObjectWeb are providing the ability for the broadest range of companies to take advantage of this highly flexible, scalable approach, and delivering the means to deploy SOA in their enterprises."

Steve quoted in SearchWebServices: "Enterprise-ready, mission-critical software is never going to be free. " -- "perception of openness is extremely important" -- "It's great for the people who like digging into the technology itself"

JOnAS in the Sky (With Diamonds?)

2005-06-24T18:14:00.000+02:00

JOnAS is used in LibreSource, a platform used to develop the SPIS project that involves contributors from US, Europe & Japan Space Agencies:

LibreSource is a software platform dedicated to the software development and management of distributed communities. LibreSource is the collaborative platform used to develop the open-source project SPIS, that aims at developing a software toolkit for spacecraft-plasma interactions and spacecraft charging modelling. Initiated and supported by the European Space Agency (ESA) and mainly designed by ONERA and Artenum, SPIS was started in December 2002 in the frame of the scientific and industrial SPINE community.

Initially European, the SPINE community is international today, with about bout 100 members, including the American (NASA, US-Air Force) and Japanese (JAXA) Agencies. In extension, LibreSource Enterprise Edition, has been chosen by these space agencies as a tool of collaborative work and centralised archiving in the frame of a program of standardisation and cross-validation of spacecraft charging simulation software. The SPINE's LibreSource platform is hosted by Artenum.

LibreSource’s design, based on the JAVA/J2EE technology and the application sever Jonas resulting from the ObjectWeb project, enabled to develop a set of robust applications, while disregarding the underlying software architecture.

ObjectWeb Founder to Retire

2005-06-23T10:49:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, during the afternoon session of the Architecture Meeting, we learnt that Gerard Vandome is about to retire. Gerard is JOnAS' project leader. He was at the origin of ObjectWeb.

It was back in 1998-1999. Teams from Bull, INRIA and France Telecom R&D were collaborating on middleware research projects. Gerard, who was with Bull, conviced his employer to open-source a project he was working on: an EJB server. It was the very first open-source EJB project, and the precursor of all open-source implementations of J2EE. JBoss did not exist yet. At this time, Marc Fleury reportedly came around and proposed to Gerard to work for him! For some reason, it did not happen. Gerard's idea was to promote a collaborative and nonprofit vision of open-source. With Jean-Bernard Stefani (FT R&D) and Roland Balter (INRIA), he created ObjectWeb, and worked to give it a legal framework. ObjectWeb became a consortium in 2002.

Gerard will retire in a few months. We all owe him one for what he did in favor of open-source middleware!

ObjectWeb Architecture Meeting - Day 2

2005-06-22T11:09:00.000+02:00

June 21 is the "Fete de la musique" in France, an increasingly popular celebration of the equinox where amateur bands play music in the streets. It was pretty crowded in the streets of Grenoble last night, with really nice weather, lots of bands and packed cafés. A nice musical bridge between the two days of the Architecture Meeting!

Today Takoua Abdellatif presents the results of a research project she works on, with a prototype named "jonasALaCarte". It is an attempt to refactor JOnAS with the Fractal component model. It is implemented with Julia, a Java implementation of Fractal (that proved stable and is used in production at France Telecom). It brings the advantages of an explicit architecture, fine grained management, an on-demand distributed architecture (one instance of JOnAS can be scattered on several distributed JVMs), etc. Web container, EJB container, transation manager, etc, can be deployed on different nodes, with a much finer granularity than allowed by a monolithic JOnAS. Fractal brings nice feature, such as the possibility to upgrade a subsystem (eg Tomcat for web container), by replacing it with a more recent version for example, on the fly and without shutting down the service. jonasALaCarte also is compliant with JSR88.

Jean-Bernard Stefani proposes steps towards "JOnAS NG". He advocates for a Fractal based design for the future of JOnAS. He suggests how Fractal design can be leveraged to improve administration features in JOnAS. He gives hints at the complementary roles that AOP and OSGi can play in a Fractal based design.

Fractal is a very generic component model, as the model can be used to describe several types of components: without introspection (POJOs); with minimal introspection (COM component); with binding controller and fixed lifecycle manager (OSGi bundle); with transactional controller, content controller for POJOs with lifecycle interface (EJB). Fractal may be the basis for a micro-kernel architecture, actually what JB calls an "exo-kernel" architecture that goes beyond what a JMX based micro-kernel is. Automated system management would allow fault management: components would be the unit for fault isolation, for replication and recovery (replacement of faulty components).

So is AOP the new graal of software design? It sometimes sounds too much like a marketing gimmick. Anyways software architecture comes first, JB says, and it makes sense. Only good architecture makes it possible to put pointcuts and to apply advices at the right places. Aspect weavers can be understood as tools to program Fractal component controllers. Fractal code can be packaged as OSGi bundles. LSR Adele team developped the Froggi project which is an examplification of this possibility. JB proposes an increamental roadmap to refactor JOnAS with Fractal concepts. It'd start a coarse grain "fractalization" (eg jonasALaCarte). Then the EJB controller would be fractalized, EJB would then be made Fractal components. The interesting idea is that EJBs would then be seen as subcomponents of their container! And then fractalization would be carried on at a finer grained level... Sounds to me that this recursive peek into the internals of a webapp deployed on an application server would be pretty scary to the average system administrator!

Pedro Garcia Lopez (Univ Rovira I Virgilli) presents the SNAP P2P routing platform and the possible deployment of J2EE on SNAP. SNAP is a candidate to become an ObjectWeb project. Why P2P? Because workstations are everyday more powerfull, because the EDGE wave is coming. Eg: the Groove P2P collaborative platform has been recently bought by Microsoft. SNAP is about J2EE web application deployment in a worldwide P2P network. SNAP provides: security, persistence, load balancing, transparent failover and recovery. Companies such as Atos Origin expressed interest in SNAP. Massive deployment planned for next year. Wahoo... P2P worldwide application is another pretty cool (and scary?) vision indeed! SNAP is based on FreePastry from Rice University, a Java open-source implementation as P2P substrate. FreePastry manages an organised P2P architecture. DERMI is an RMI implementation based on P2P routing. DERMI offers sync/async invocations, a naming service, persistence, activation, invocation abstractions, basic administration features. SNAP comes with a lightweight component model (P2PCM). It proposes adaptative component activation to adapt to the network loda -- it reminds me of features implemented in ProActive. In SNAP, decentralized web app deployment is possible. Signed apps are distributed. Persistence relies on a replicated file warehouse. The closest instance is activated when a request is processed. SNAP is being tested with node scattered around the world (Pedro shows a worldmap with spots in N. America, Brazil, Europe, Asia). Pedro sees potential synergies between SNAP and Fractal, JOnAS, C-JDBC, ProActive and Jade. Hence the application to become an ObjectWeb project.

This morning session of the Architecture Meeting was a very exciting peek into the future of (open-source) middleware indeed!

Afternoon session:

Francois Exertier, JOnAS' architect, presented the directions and roadmap for JOnAS 5. I sadly missed most of his presentation. JOnAS will be compliant with J2EE 5 / EJB 3. He anticipates the availability of an alpha version by the end of 2005, a final in H1 2005.

Rafael H. Schloming talked of Red Hat goals: certified EJB3 implementation, strong community, maintainability, competitive features. A nasty aspect of EJB3 is that the spec presumes a relational backend. If you write native SQL queries, the implementation would pass the compatibility test suite, yet not being able to run on non relational backends. EJB3 is heavily modeled on Hibernate. Sebastien Chassande remarks that JDO has been around for about 6 years... so the question is who invented what? As for me, I remember of EOF, a framework in the NeXTSTEP world (ObjectiveC) that had, 10 years ago, concepts at least as advanced as those available today in the Java world! A worry is expressed by the audience that Hibernate may become the de facto reference implementation of EJB3. This would be unfair, since Hibernate is licensed under LGPL and basically controlled by one commercial entity. One would rather expect a RI to be hosted by a nonprofit.

Sebastien Chassande-Barrioz presents results of a benchmark that France Telecom R&D ran to assess performances of several OR mapping tools. Before the bench, FT used either pure JBDC, Toplink or Hibernate. Sebastien said it changed after the bench... The goal was to select the preferred persistence tool for development at FT (or at least by some teams). It is worth noticing that CMP 2 is not recommended at FT for complexity reasons. The bench has been run on Versant 3.2 (formely JDO genie), Kodo 3.2. (and other commercial JDO, but Sebastien did not the OK from the vendors to publish results) and Hibernate. Hibernate 2.1 was the only stable version available at this time.

The bench used the ObjectWeb CLIF performance testing framework. The results are pretty clear. JDO products and JDBC perform about the same. When the load increases, the performances of Hibernate drop earlier and much more that other tested solutions. The conclusions of the bench is that JDO should be prefered over Hibernate. An assessment of Speedo and JOnAS CMP2.0 is to be done. A partial benchmark (read access) between JOnAS CMP2, Hibernate, JDBC, Speedo and Versant puts Speedo & CMP2 in pole position, while Hibernate, again, is the worst performer. A remark: since CMP has a very different programmatic model than JDO or Hibernate, the result about JOnAS CMP2 should be considered with caution. The results of these bench have already been presented at the Club Java day on June 13. ObjectWeb proposes to organize a public performance contest ("Plugtest"), jointly with ETSI, in Q2 2006. Competing vendors would be provided the benchmark application ahead of time for fine tuning.

ObjectWeb Architecture Meeting

2005-06-21T19:52:00.000+02:00

Two projects presented at the Architecture Meeting, held in Grenoble, France, today.

Gael Blondelle, from EBM Websourcing, presented a project proposal for implementing the JBI (JSR 208) specifications. According to me, the nice thing about their proposal is threefold:
- they propose to implement distribution features at the container level, so that a single administration domain may be distributed
- to achieve this, they propose to rely on JORAM, an ObjectWeb MOM that comes with nice clustering features and supports JMS. They also think of using XQuark and Bonita.
- the development would involve several companies of the consortium

Representatives of Engineering presented their Spago and SpagoBI projects. They are proposed to ObjectWeb -- and the projects are currently being reviewed. I'm not aware of the final decision though. SpagoBI is a proposal targeting business intelligence, that goes beyond what Eclipse BIRT covers. BIRT is about reporting, whereas SpagoBI encompasses OLAP, data mining, etc.

I tried to give a preview on what the future of ObjectWeb may be. A rationale for letting ObjectWeb grow has been approved by the board on June 20, 2005. It will be refined in the comming months and be gradually unveiled to the community as it becomes clearer. Input from the community is of course welcome at any time.

Software Patents Strike Back?

2005-06-21T19:12:00.000+02:00

It's a long story. Software patents in Europe... Too long to cover in this blog actually, and heavily covered already in so much material. ObjectWeb issued a position paper about swpats (by the way, the English translation is loosy). If you read French, I published a paper about the reasons why Europe should be very careful with regards to software patents.

So what's going on? The plenary vote of the second reading on the European software patent directive will be held around 5 July, 2005. The FFII (Federation for a Free Information Infrastructure) calls SMEs for participation in a conference with European MEP from the European People's Party, a "EU-level party which incorporates 38 like-minded national parties of the center-right".

Quoting the call: "If you are an SME representative you are invited to speak for 2-3 minutes and sit in a privileged panel during the session. The authentic voice of entrepreneurs is particularily needed since the support for FFII's postion has been weakened in EPP (and also in ALDE) due to intense lobbying from EICTA, BSA, CompTIA and other organisations, falsely claiming they represent you and your company's interest."

This is to make the voice of small companies better heard -- because in Europe, the software market is highly fragmented and the "economic majority" is made of SMEs. Most European software companies I meet consistently speak against software patents. Just to give one example, Engineering Ingegneria Infomatica (which is not a SME, but still an European software company, one of the leading IT companies in Italy), publicly spoke against software patents.

XCalia Launches an Integration Suite

2005-06-20T18:40:00.000+02:00

Right when Iona was announcing their membership in ObjectWeb and their contribution to the ESBi with the Celtix project, XCalia (formely Libelis, a member of ObjectWeb for a couple of years) announced a new integration suite... based on ObjectWeb middleware.

XCalia Integration Platform (XIP) is based on JOnAS, JORAM and JOTM and comes with an orchestration engine.

ESB Initiative Welcomes New Member Iona

2005-06-20T10:49:00.000+02:00

One year after its inception, of the "ESB initiative" brings major results.

Too often, open-source projects today are purely technology driven - the rationale being meritocracy and technical savvyness. This is pretty unreallistic to think that in the modern world, technology for the sake of it may be the way to go. There is no denying there's room for technology driven open-source projects, but the market is now asking for software that answer business needs.

A way to go is to create a company with a business model centered around one open-source platform -- and more often reatining a stranglehold over the project, hence departing from the open-source spirit and ending up with "proprietary open-source". We in ObjectWeb believe there's room for collaborative efforts that involve more than one single company. And we believe they can be driven by market trends and address market segments.

This was the purpose of the "ESB initiative". The ESB initiative is not an open-source project. It is not a technology platform. It is a first try at what may be a market-driven, yet business neutral, way of developping open-source software.

ESBi attracted several new members and new projects (see here, here, here, here). Today, Iona announced they join ObjectWeb and contribute to the ESBi. This is a significant announcement! ObjectWeb confirms its position as the leading open-source community in business integration.

The project started and lead by Iona is named Celtix. It'll be licensed under LGPL. Paul Krill in InfoWorld: "Similar to other open source business models, Iona hopes to leverage Celtix by providing value-added services and enticing some Celtix customers to purchase Artix."

ObjectWeb Executive Director Christophe Ney said: “IONA will bring recognized expertise to the ObjectWeb community and its contribution will tremendously increase the momentum of the ESBi. For these reasons, we see Celtix as a natural extension to the projects currently hosted by ObjectWeb. Additionally, synergy with other ObjectWeb projects offers the real opportunity for Celtix to serve as a key element in an open source business integration toolbox comprised of both existing and future ESBi projects.”

Think of ESBi as a toolbox, that users or vendors, can use to create their own added value offer. No SPOF in the ecosystem. We anticipate that several differentiated and competitive offers would appear soon on the market -- one being that of Iona. Some ObjectWeb members already have offerings: eg Open Wide with Nosica. Some are working on new projects but - hush - nothing is certain yet.

An Open Answer to David Berlind

2005-06-15T11:09:00.000+02:00

I recently had the (pretty sad) surprise to discover a part of a private email of mine published online. It was in David Berlind's blog (David writes for ZDNet). People go a little too fast with these blog things... They sometimes forget good ol' rules of courtesy :)

As the writer of the email to David, I'd like to publish the whole original mail as an open letter now. Here's the message I sent to David:

"Dear David,

while reviewing press coverage about ObjectWeb, I saw this paper: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1374
"JBoss' Marc Fleury 'welcomes' IBM and Gluecode to the open source J2EE party"

You write:

"The other two open source J2EE players — ObjectWeb's JOnAS and Gluecode — are barely blips on the J2EE radar. JOnAS, which is the app server that's packaged with Red Hat Linux, can't even claim to be a J2EE server because putting the J2EE brand on a Java application requires special certification — something JOnAS doesn't have yet."

This appears to be blatant misinformation. JOnAS was certified for over 3 months when the paper went out (see http://jonas.objectweb.org/, http://www.objectweb.org/phorum/read.php?f=25&i=88&t=88, for instance). It's sad to see that JBoss communication policy is based on rant and deceptive statements. Although we respect all viewpoints, we cannot accept to see deceptive information about ObjectWeb propagated in the press.
I'm at your disposal to organize an interview with you and ObjectWeb officers, so you could hear for yourself what ObjectWeb is achieving, including J2EE certification, international development, etc.

Best regards,"

So Marc did not propagate misleading information about ObjectWeb/JOnAS. It's a relief indeed, because I don't have a problem with Marc. He does his job, he does it pretty well, and I like his French accent (although his is much lighter than mine!).

The fault was David's:
- David's blog article stating that JOnAS is not certified yet, is dated May 12, 2005.
- First certified version of JOnAS was available and announced online on February 14, 2005.
- First stable certified was available on April 1, 2005 (not an April's fool though).

You do the math.

So what's the point here? A mistaken statement appeared online? This is not the end of the world. What I asked for was the opportunity to explain the situation to a reporter, so that this reporter could better understand the reality of the situation, and at the end of the day do a better job (informing his readers).

The arguments that David presents in his second blog article tend to demonstrate that he cannot tell today whether, at the time he published his first blog entry (May 12), the available version of JOnAS was certfied or not. If he had checked before publishing the entry on May 12, he would have known then, he would still know today...

I'm gonna send a (private) email to David, to let him know I blogged about this affair. Be prepared to see the (private) email I'll send him published online anytime :)