magpiebrain

Its handy having someone on the inside – further to my “recent speculation”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000055.html as to the revoking of CVS commit rights over at the “JBoss”:http://www.jboss.org project, this email from Bill Burke has surfaced:

JBoss Group, as caretaker of the JBoss project, has recently decided to
remove CVS access committers for a few of our committers. We do not remove
from CVS without good reason nor without just cause. These are the reasons
for the removals:

1. These individuals have refused to discuss design issues on our public
forums. It is crucial to have a public record of design discussions so that
others may particpate in future work.

2. More importantly, we have learned that they have forked JBoss. We also
believe they are preparing to submit it, or some derivation, to the new
Apache Geronimo project which would violate copyright and LGPL. Our proof?

http://sourceforge.net/projects/elba

3. There is just too much conflict of interest of developers working on two
different J2EE projects that are being developed under two very different
open-source licenses.

JBoss Group believes strongly in the LGPL license and will protect all
copyrights held by any JBoss contributor.

A friend of mine had a look at the elba project:

I had a quick look a random java file on the site above, and it’s a direct copy of a JBoss one, with the JBoss header changed.

From Mark Fleury’s “previous email”:http://www.magpiebrain.com/archives/000055.html it seems that only the original copyright holders of the code may fork JBoss. That said, the “Core Developers Network”:http://www.coredevelopers.net/ (who I suspect are the people behind Elba) have among their members some pretty heavyweight JBoss-contributors (they have the entire CMP team IIRC), who probably DO have copyright to areas of JBoss’s code.

_Update_: Just had a look at the Project Member List for the Elba project, and all of “The Core Developers team”:http://www.coredevelopers.net/members/ are there, just as I thought. I hope they can afford a lawyer – the JBoss guys sound pissed….

Thanks to a friend for this heads up – seems Mark Fleury has responded to the creation of the Geronimo project in the latest newsletter on the JBoss mailing list:

First a bit of history. I offered JBoss when it was 4 month old to
Apache. The guys at Jakarta vote OK unanimously and their vote was
overridden by Brian Behlendorf. The reason from behlendorf was that they
‘were not the dust bin of open source projects’. I heard the Apache
crowd got offended for me calling them “a bunch of fat ladies drinking
tea” at a later date when they were running around telling us how to run
our project. We had reports that this was the non-official reason for
this “challenge”. Challenge accepted. More seriously as we overtake
them in corporate penetration and business model, I guess they are
finally looking beyond the HTTPD C co debase and imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery.

We are the real thing, all we have so far is talk and announcement, announcements are a dime a dozen. Apache code on this project has yet to be released and then production reached and then maturity bla bla bla. I have little comment on the project except to say that JBOSS IS NOT A PART OF IT. In a misleading announcement Apache chairman’s Greg Stein implied JBoss was participating and that JBOSS CODE WAS PART OF THE PROJECT. No current JBoss developers are participating in the Apache J2EE project and since JBoss is LGPL only full copyright holders can offer JBoss code under other licenses. Bottom line? JBoss can’t be forked by apache. As our customers know, we are a business, a serious one and we seriously believe in and defend “professional open source”. That includes legal protection of IP. Make no mistakes, JBoss will AGGRESIVELY defend its copyright and LGPL license.

Ouch! So, JBoss code will not be part of Geronimo unless Geronimo is offered ONLY under an LGPL license, which is highly unlikely to be the case given that its an Apache project. This leads me to believe that OpenEJB will likely form the basis for the EJB container inside Geronimo – OpenEJB developers are among those already signedup.

The Core Developers Network seems to be backing the Geronimo initiative quite strongly, and its intersting to note that the Core Developers Network’s consultants have all been heavily involved in JBoss development – beyond any contributions to the JBoss code base they also sell themselves as JBoss consultants, just as they did for JBoss itself before they left earlier this year.

It seems that JBoss’s reaction to the Geronimo project may not be limited to strongly worded emails – according to my friend on the JBoss mailing list one of the Jetty-JBoss developers has very recently had his commit rights revoked without warning and the only clue seems to of been this developers involvement with Geronimo. Its also important to note that in his email Mark Fleury states that no _current_ JBoss developers are involved in Geronimo, which must mean the guys at Core Developers have all had their commit rights revoked, despite their apparent heavy involvement with JBoss (check the members page for information concerning their apparent ongoing involvement ). Expect this to run and run…

A long piece over at “TheServerSide”:http://www.theserverside details the launch of Apache’s Geronimo project, which aims to produce a fully certified J2EE implementation.

One of the core commitments is for the J2EE implementation to be fully J2EE compliant. The Apache Foundation has access to the J2EE TCKs, which make the certification possible. The core developers who have “signed up” include: Richard
Monson-Haefel (OpenEJB), Geir Magnusson Jr. (Apache), Dain Sundstrum (Core Dev Network), James Strachan (Apache), and more.

Give the variety of Open Source projects out there which are already implementations of various bits of the J2EE specification (I thinking here of “Tomcat”:http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/, “JBoss”:http://www.jboss.org/, “OpenEJB”:http://openejb.sourceforge.net/ etc) it will be interesting to see if how many of these existing implementations become part of the project or if any will be rewritten. The inclusion of both OpenEJB developers and JBoss developers (or more specifically the guys who form the “Core Developers Network”:http://www.coredevelopers.net/) is interesting – I wonder which one will get used? There doesn’t seem to be a website for the project as yet. Expect more on this in the coming weeks.