Standing in the Field @ Valley Forge

Standing in the Field

Notes from SJS Application Server Field Engineering

« Previous day (May 12, 2005) | Main | Next day (May 14, 2005) »
Friday May 13, 2005
The JBoss Killer

So everyone is calling IBM's acquisition of Gluecode a move to create a "JBoss killer". Gluecode is a very small company that provides an integrated application server suite around the Apache Geronimo application server, some other related Apache projects, and some management and monitoring tools.

Since there have been rumors of IBM trying to create an open source implementation of J2SE, it's entirely reasonable that IBM would want an open source application server to go with their J2SE implementation. All in all, I find the acquisition interesting, but not earth shattering. Geronimo and the other Apache projects have existed for some time now and I don't think that IBM's acquisition of Gluecode really changes the industry that much.

But Marc Fleury, Founder/Chairman/CEO of JBoss, is his usual acerbic self. (Fleury was the one who called the Apache Foundation “a bunch of fat ladies drinking tea” and who got caught "astroturfing" TheServerSide.)

Like Rich, I can't follow Marc's argument about why this acquisition is bad for Sun. Sun would love to see an open source implementation of J2EE that is more than grudgingly J2EE certified. (When Marc spoke at my JUG he complained at length about what a waste of time the J2EE certification is.) And with a couple million downloads of Sun Application Server, I'm not sure that Sun has to worry about Gluecode suddenly becoming a volume play that takes Sun out of the picture. All things considered, IBM has been a good friend to Java and I can't see IBM making an investment in open source as any kind of threat to the integrity of the Java Community Process.

(2005-05-13 20:21:10.0) Permalink Comments [1]