I think what this has proved is that open source is bigger than Linux, bigger than JBoss, bigger than IBM, and bigger than Microsoft, said Marc Fleury at the company’s JBoss World event in Barcelona. It shows a shift of mentality that shows that open source is a bigger development than the operating system and middleware.
The agreement, announced in September, sees Microsoft and Atlanta, Georgia-based JBoss teaming up on interoperability initiatives to enable the JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite to play nicely with Windows, the operating system of choice for 50% of JBoss customers.
Mr Fleury said that work had already proven fruitful with functionality to enable the JBoss Portal offering single sign-on via Active Directory close to release, and work progressing on SQL Server support for JDBC drivers, and the delivery of a JBoss management pack for Microsoft Operations Manager.
Beyond those developments, Mr Fleury also revealed that JBoss is planning to push NHibernate, a port of the Hibernate object persistence tool for Microsoft’s .NET, maintaining that the announcement was based on facts rather than a statement of intention.
We’re dead serious, he said. We wouldn’t do this if there wasn’t the meat that our customers could see.
With the Microsoft agreement in place, JBoss is also turning its attention to some other potential agreements with organizations that are closer to home.
We’re in discussion with IBM, he said, noting that a partnership might still be possible despite IBM’s May acquisition of Apache Geronimo application server-based Gluecode.
The Global Services people were in contact with us trying to form a partnership, he added. Those conversations took a back seat when IBM announced its open source strategy.
As well as IBM, JBoss is also considering getting closer to the ObjectWeb Consortium, home to the rival JOnAS application server. ObjectWeb has had JOnAS for a long time and it has been the focus to some degree, said Mr Fleury.
There is no sense for us to support JOnAS but just like we participate in the Apache community, there is no problem with us bringing some professional open source to ObjectWeb. We haven’t agreed anything with ObjectWeb yet, but we are looking forward to participating in many, many more communities.
