Thanks to Russ and the guys at #mobitopia, here’s an Inquirer article on the JBoss fork/coup:
8:00 am — Seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network. Their charter “is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects”.
It’s all quite confusing. The Inquirer story is completely from the CDN point of view. No word yet from Fleury and what’s left of the JBoss team. I have a feeling that this fork is bad PR for JBoss, the CDN, and Open Source. The major app server vendors are going to use this fork/coup as proof that Open Source is volitile and that customers are better off with their closed solutions.
I wish the CDN luck, but it looks like they don’t need too much of it:
This means The JBoss Group is going to have a tough fight on their hands here in the States. Core Developers Network has a superior grasp on the CMP internals. They’ve got the entire Jetty crew. They’ve got the man who authored the distributed transaction manager and the JCA subsystem. Their early work heavily influenced the drive to AOP. They have an Apache Jakarta board member, which could make things very interesting. Their site indicates they’re expanding beyond the JBoss horizon to cover a broader spectrum of open source J2EE software. Finally, they’re driving home the distinction between “Business” and “Project”.
Honestly I’ve only ever tinkered around with JBoss. A major barrier for me was the fact that for anything beyond bare INSTALL information, you have to buy the book. How do I administer JBoss? Buy the book. How do I configure this thing the way I want it? Buy the book. That never thrilled me too much.
Update: This is really more of a coup than a fork. It’s a corporate fork, and not an open source one as far as I can tell. Here’s some more info from the CDN site:
We are committed to having the same level of involvement in our current projects that we have had in the past. This means that we will continue to work on the JBoss project itself. In addition, we will continue to support the JBoss project via the jboss-development and jboss-users mailing lists maintained by SourceForge.net, as well as any other open public forum. Unfortunately, the forums on jboss.org are a commercial venue for the JBoss Group LLC, and therefore we will not be participating in them.