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Simon,
Without commenting on the rest of your message, I do feel the need to correct comments relating Elba and Geronimo. Elba is *NOT* part of Geromino. The comments on the Elba web site that told you otherwise about Elba being related to Apache or Geronimo in any way were supposed to be corrected weeks ago.
Open Source licenses permit projects to fork, however forking code does not change the license requirements due to the copyright holder. The ASF only accepts contributions of code from the rightful copyright holder. This is a matter of law, but equally a matter of ethics.
Elba is a fork of JBoss, and that code is not and will not be accepted into the Geronimo project, nor is the ASF responsible in any way for the Elba project. I believe that it is fair to say that the ASF is thrilled to have the talents of those individuals, along with the talents of 100s of other developers currently participating on the Geromoni development list, but the only connection between Geromino and Elba are individual community members.
--- Noel
-----Original Message-----Robert Scoble comments on the fork of JBoss by the Elba project but doesn't dig any deeper. In particular, one might come to the conclusion that forks like this are an every-day occurrence. In fact, external forks of established projects like JBoss happen once in a blue moon and when they do are a sign of a much deeper malaise. Yes, all society is driven by human interactions (otherwise known as 'politics') but a fork like this is a real rarity and deserves scrutiny.
From: Simon Phipps [mailto:mink@...]
Sent: Friday, August 29, 2003 5:51
To: webmink@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Webmink : the blog] Open source and forks
Elba has been created as part of Apache's Geronimo project, announced at LinuxWorld - the FAQ explains:This project was originally going to provide code that allowed Geronimo to run in JBoss?, but since there seems to be a policy of removing anyone that works on Geronimo from the JBoss? project, we decided we had to fork.I've been anticipating the creation of Geronimo ever since JCP 2.5 was ratified and now it's started wish it every success. It would have been obvious for this project to have worked hand-in-hand with JBoss - after all, pretty much every other J2EE-related open source project has joined the party. But in this case, it turned out that wasn't going to happen. Not just because of the JBoss LGPL license usage cited on the Geronimo FAQ though. In fact, some of the committers from the JBoss project had their ability to participate in the JBoss community revoked unilaterally becuase of their offer of their own code to Geronimo (I also have this first-hand). As one comment says,The fact that so many key developers have left the JBoss project over the years indicates that at least for some, there is a significant problem with the JBoss project.So it seems this forking rarity is a response to widely-recognised issues, not with the JBoss code or even with the JBoss project, but with the eponymous company pulling the strings behind the scenes. As Stephen commented, prima facie the Apache project was getting special treatment with regard to J2EE certification but in fact the issue was deeper and darker.
Sure the code is open - but the process is not. Even when on the JBossGroup mailing list, many discussions took place behind closed doors and were not negotiable.
I do not wish to diminish the massive job that MF has done to get JBoss to where it is today - that is something that only incredible hard work and dedication could have achieved. However, in return for his organizational contributions he has obtained a near monopoly on the development process and commercial exploitation of the project.
What do we learn from this? Well, the big lesson I'd send back to Robert is that, when it's open source, there is a remedy. It's rarely used as it's extreme medicine, but I predict it will work in this case. Now, what's our remedy for the code-base that's causing most of us extreme e-mail stress at the moment? Seems we just have to keep on trusting or switching...
--
Posted by Simon Phipps to Webmink : the blog at 8/29/2003 10:35:11 AM
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