ApacheCon is in full swing, and there are a lot of developers from the Java world there. The Apache Software Foundation signed the TCK J2EE license, which allows Geronimo "to be an open source J2EE implementation under a business-friendly license". There is a lot of talk on Geronimo, as well as other favorites such as the budding Tapestry.

ApacheCon Coverage

Howard Lewis Ship @ ApacheCon

On-site at ApacheCon

ApacheCon presentation post-mortem

Howard Lewis Ship 1.5: Now with ASF Membership!

ApacheCon: XMLBeans

Richard Monson-Haefel @ ApacheCon

The State of Geronimo

ApacheCon Hackathon: Rediscovering my religion

James Strachan @ ApacheCon

ApacheCon fun: Geronimo & Groovy

Great Geronimo session & Apache signs J2EE TCK!

If you are at ApacheCon, tell us what you think!

Sun doesn't sign JBoss up for TCK until geronimo passes -> JBoss/Fleury+Burke can't claim ASF violates LGPL were JBoss to update their code prior to geronimo passing TCK. If anything JBoss will appear in violation if a J2EE certified OSS AS is released before JBoss is certified. Correct or no?

Sun doesn't sign JBoss up for TCK until geronimo passes ..

The two should be completely unrelated. I don't know what political mascinations are going on behind the scenes, but Sun should be offering the TCK under RAND (Reasonable And Non Discriminatory) terms to all businesses willing to accept the standard terms, and "all" (hence "Non Discriminatory") includes JBoss Group.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Tangosol, Inc.
Coherence: Clustered JCache for Grid Computing!

In fact, it is announced this morning that JBoss has signed the J2EE (TM) TCK license as well. There is already some press coverage on this.

glen

looks like a level playing field. keep it real!

What does this mean to the Apache license ? Any restrictions out of the J2EE license ?

Can we download the TCK now from Apache.org to verify that a release really passed ? How can the community contribute to the TCK test process if not ?

What if I take Geronimo sources and package them into another product ? Is this product J2EE certified too ? If I did not modify sources of course...

What is certified when passing the tests ? Just the binaries or the source also ?

Could someone please comment on questions like that ?

Thanks.

Alfred Madl

>
> What is certified when passing the tests ? Just the binaries or the source also ?

Compatibility is established through testing using the Compatibility Test Suite. The tests operate on a compiled binary, not on source. This means that compatibility can only be established, and therefore only asserted or claimed, for the binary, not for the source.

This leads to:
  - if you take the source and add it to
    something larger, it isn't Compatible.
  - if you take the source and recompile
    it, it isn't Compatible.

This last point isn't what some might expect, so let me explain. The output generated by compiling may depend on various elements of the compilation environment, eg. the javac version, classpath, etc. So recompiling without the precise same complete environment may lead to different compiler output, and may behave differently under test, or more importantly, in deployment.

Hope this helps to clarify,

glen

>

The software will be released under the standard Apache Software License. There are no changes or added limitations placed upon you other than that derived works cannot be called certified. This is no different than the current situation - web servers derived ftom the http codebase can't be called Apache httpd, for example.

> Can we download the TCK now from Apache.org to verify that a release really passed ? How can the community contribute to the TCK test process if not ?

The TCK is not available for download. The TCK is licensed by the ASF and cannot be redistributed. During the process of getting the codebase to pass the TCK, we will have a way for community members not covered by the NDA needed to access the TCK to participate in the test-fail-stratchhead-fix process. When we have a release that passes the TCK, Sun (I assume) will certify. The process is no different for us than it is for BEA or IBM.

>
> What if I take Geronimo sources and package them into another product ? Is this product J2EE certified too ? If I did not modify sources of course...

No - only the binary distribution from Apache is certified. You will be free to take the code used for the distribution and do what you wish, of course, but until your derived work passes the TCK that you licensed from Sun, you cannot call that software certified as passing the TCK

>
> What is certified when passing the tests ? Just the binaries or the source also ?

Just the binaries. The tests are runtime - testing the execution of the binary (and other aspects of the binary) - so the source isn't certified.

>
> Could someone please comment on questions like that ?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Alfred Madl

I noticed Andy Oliver blogged about ApacheCon. Why not link to his posts as well?