Features

JBoss Open Source Federation

By Dilip Thomas

JBoss, Inc., has debuted the JBoss Open Source Federation to provide access to value-added services, technology infrastructure and marketing support for open source projects that integrate with the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) and share the Professional Open Source vision of JBoss. In the future, JBoss will add access to the JBoss Network for Federation projects, creating a single platform to provide customers with services and software for JEMS and related open source applications and tools.

By creating the JBoss Open Source Federation, JBoss offers customers a trusted source for services and software that integrate with products such as the JBoss Application Server, the first J2EE-certified open source application server; Apache Jakarta Tomcat, the most popular Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages web container; the Hibernate object/relational mapping engine; and JBoss jBPM open source business process management software. JBoss partners gain an additional channel for their open source offerings, including a route to make proprietary software open source.

Inaugural members of the JBoss Open Source Federation include Funambol, JasperReports, and XWiki. All JBoss Open Source Federation projects are required to demonstrate integration with the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System. Projects must be based on an OSI-certified open source license and may also be listed with other open source communities, such as Apache, Eclipse, ObjectWeb or SourceForge. Additionally, they must provide Professional Open Source services, such as training and documentation, for their projects.

The Federation provides infrastructure, ready access to information about third-party projects, Professional Open Source services and project launch assistance for companies wishing to open source proprietary software. JBoss Open Source Federation projects will share the same infrastructure, JBoss Forge, used by the JBoss family of projects.

The JBoss Forge infrastructure offers free hosting; project web pages; task management, project management and bug tracking through JIRA, an issue tracking and project management application; forums, wikis and blogs; documentation download; email notification lists; and integration with SourceForge for CVS (concurrent versions system) support, allowing code to be stored in a centralized location. Integration with the JBoss Network for patch management, updates and upgrades will be added in the future.

Federation partners can use fee-based JBoss Professional Open Source Services, including training, consulting and support; assistance on new open source projects or taking proprietary software and making it available as open source code; indemnification; integration support; and marketing support.

The JBoss Forge is currently in beta mode; JBoss is limiting the number of projects that may run on the Forge during the beta period. Projects that are interested in the JBoss Open Source Federation may contact JBoss at josf@jboss.com.


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