Sun offers 'olive branch' to JBoss

By Martin LaMonica, CNET News, 21 March, 2003 15:01

NEWS

Java creator Sun Microsystems has made an important compliance test available to JBoss, the latest manoeuvre in an ongoing tussle between the industry giant and the upstart open-source software company. Sun last week offered JBoss the opportunity to license a set of testing tools to see if its software adheres to the Sun-sanctioned Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification, said Simon Phipps, Sun's chief technology evangelist. If JBoss's Java server software passes the compliance test, it can gain certification of J2EE compliance. Marc Fleury, founder and president of JBoss, confirmed on Wednesday that his company and Sun are talking about licensing and certification but said he could not comment further because of confidentiality agreements. JBoss is a commercial company that provides consulting services around JBoss open-source Java software. Official certification that Java software is compliant with J2EE is important to both software companies and their customers. One of the key draws of standardised software is that corporations are not tied to a single vendor. For example, a company that writes a billing application using J2EE software and tools should be able to run that program on any J2EE-compliant software without extensive manual coding. JBoss is a Java application server for building and deploying custom applications. JBoss software is gaining increasing attention, particularly among Java developers, as an open-source alternative to commercial Java application servers. JBoss has not been able to call its software J2EE compliant because it has not gone through the certification tests. But the company asserts that its software is compatible with J2EE because applications written for commercial Java applications servers can be reworked to run on JBoss in a matter of hours or days. JBoss tried for a year to get certification tests from Sun but did not get any reply until last week, Fleury said. In previous interviews with CNET News.com, Fleury has said that Sun was unwilling to make compliance tests available for business reasons. "Sun has been stonewalling us" on J2EE compliance testing, Fleury said last month. "Do they really want to acknowledge that a compliant server is free?" Phipps said on Wednesday that making the compliance test available will make it clear that Sun does not want to intentionally obstruct JBoss Group's efforts to gain J2EE compliance. However, Phipps said he doubts that JBoss software will pass the compliance test. Basing his opinion on public information, he said, JBoss software does not appear to implement all of the J2EE specification. "I predict that now that we're calling their bluff, they will make up another excuse for not doing the tests," Phipps said. Sun and other software companies define the J2EE specification in the Java Community Process. In technical committees, companies hammer out agreed-upon additions to the J2EE specification, which serves as a blueprint to write Java server software. In practice, companies use features, such as clustering, that may tie them to a particular Java server software provider. But Sun and other companies have invested substantially in a common standard and compliance testing, according to analysts. In the past, JBoss has indicated that the price of a testing suite was a barrier. Calling Sun's offer to license the test suite an "olive branch," Sun's group marketing manager for J2EE licensing, Rick Saletta, said that the company has extended "very generous commercial terms" to JBoss. "(JBoss) has gotten a lot of mileage out of positioning themselves as David and Sun as Goliath, but in actuality they've been doing a standards renegade act," said Saletta. "It's time to get past this and move forward."

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