JBoss and Exadel, what's not to like

You may have caught the announcement of JBoss and Exadel going to market together around an open sourced (LGPL) tooling platform.

The new frontier is the new web development frameworks and tools. Tons of innovation going on in the market. With the proliferation of standards, a unifying framework, rich in widgets and programming models is sorely needed. There are many of them but none really dominating. The race is still WIDE open imho.

This deal, Exadel open sourcing at JBoss is a good thing for both parties and *gasp*, whodathought, a good thing for the web development community in general. Only large proprietary vendors could afford to integrate their offerings, finally we have a pure opensource offering in the making. It will bear fruits in the short term by helping boost sales of the JBoss subscription, it will help the JBoss developers and contributors by minimizing the moving parts when it gets to tooling their innovation. It will greatly help RedHat customers by giving them one of the most advanced and innovative web development framework and integrated.

Of course no good deed goes unpunished or un-noticed, but this time the gallery of critics is amusing. One blog from an IBM employee, seems really obsessed with finding the "money angle". HE wants to make it clear that it was not for Love of the JBoss community that Exadel Open Source'd it's framework. I read that one a week ago and I am still laughing. When I realized the guy was involved in the geronimo fiasco of an acquisition I felt the hypocrisy was a bit too big. Insane.

Then I was disappointed to see the CEO of MyEclipse post a barely coherent blog following the announcement of enhanced competition. I just didn't get his title "biting the hand that feeds' until I realized he was talking about himself and how his company was feeding JBoss and JBoss bit him. Whoaaa, I mean, I have seen all kinds of claims of synergy and "extreme synergy", but "we made you, and you turned on us" is a new one on me. I heard of myEclipse as a serious supplier of Eclipse plugin about a year ago and to me it was just that an "eclipse" plug-in company.

For some reason the press is picking this blog as "can people profit from other people's OSS work?" of course, he just did! big time! As long as people respect the law (copyright and licenses) then the big game of OSS goes on as one. Nothing to see here, please move on.

At the end of the day could it be that you might have been a tiny bit greedy? Hmmmm, I don't know. Deals are tricky things, no need to appeal to a vague "spirit of open source" we are violating because the deal didn't go your way. Jilted lover syndrome? Undignified.

He, ignore the whinning, all in all it is a great announcement from my former employer, time to deliver and we will have a serious contender in the java camp for future webdevelopment made simple ALL with free LGPL technology. Between the double investment in the RD division and this acquisition, things haven't been better since I left.

Keep the news coming boys. And remember boys and girls, don't do BSD: just say "no' to the lawyers, that's what we are doing with these tools. You will thank me later.

marcf