I "met" this week with Jim Jagielski, a great example of how both the business side and community side of open source software (OSS) comes together, as described in my post about the OSS Scorecard. Jim is both the CTO of Covalent and a director of (and I think one of the founders of) the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). The proximate cause of hooking up with Jim was the announcement on March 29 that Covalent and IBM had released JBoss migration code to ASF.
As noted in my research at various places, ASF is one of the most community-oriented of the OSS organizations. Community over code is almost a motto, according to Jagielski, who says "Good collaboration causes good code." But almost everyone in the community still needs a day job. He notes that almost all ASF "managers" are also involved in commercial enterprises. In fact, it looks like to become an ASF manager, ASF needs to trust you to keep the distinction clear. Jagielski says vis a vis Covalent, maintaining the wall is easy because Covalent does not have a conflicting "product;" its business is to service OSS code, primarily Tomcat, the Apache web server, and increasingly Geronimo--the Apache application server. He also points out that with its business-friendly license, Apache encourages more people to use ASF code, again a good fit with Covalent.
So with his Covalent hat on, Jagielski talked about the recent announcement. I was interested in the IBM Gluecode (known as WebSphere Application Server Community Edition) relationship with Covalent. Jim said he had mentored the Gluecode community before the 2005 IBM acquisition. I think Covalent would probably have supported Geronimo the way it supports the HTTP server even if IBM hadn't adopted (my word, not his) the project. But the IBM involvement with Geronimo adds a lot of intellectual power and credibility to the project.
I tweaked him about his quote in the PR release that was a subtle dig at Red Hat's JBoss. He is implicitly saying that JBoss is a "traditional J2EE application server." I don't think the BEA and Oracle OC4J guys would think that way. But Jim's point was that JBoss is constructed simply as a monolithic J2EE instantiation whereas Geronimo is a framework for entity connection using what the community calls the G-bean (what EJBs are to vanilla Java). He likes the way it is easy to strip pieces out and switch pieces into Geronimo; it can be stripped down to tomcat, jedi and the transaction manager if that's all the ISV or IT department needs.
As for the March 29 announcement, IBM and Covalent see it as another way to to promote the viability of Geronimo (which both want to do to further their own co-opetitive services businesses). Jagielski feels that many companies feel that moving from one application server to another is a major pain point. With the newly released JBoss migration tool that Covalent has open sourced, Jim says it is a straightforward transition and migration. It appears Covalent and IBM chose to start with JBoss because JBoss users are already comfortable with OSS concepts. But it also appears that a similar migration tool could work for those other "traditional J2EE application servers." Stay tuned, WebLogic and Fusion users.
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