JBoss Launches Logo, R&D Programs

The company makes waves at the JavaOne show with news of its JBoss Inside and JBoss Labs initiatives, as well as a partnership with Sleepycat Software.

SAN FRANCISCO—JBoss Inc. and its tireless leader will be moving and shaking at the JavaOne show here this week, announcing news on the product, partner and customer fronts. Marc Fleury, CEO of Atlanta-based JBoss, said the company will announce a partnership with Sleepycat Software Inc. to support JBossCache for persistence.
Sleepycat recently released a Java version of its flagship open-source database. Click here to read the story. The company also will launch its JBoss Inside program, which will be a logo-type program to identify solutions that include JBoss technology and gives an indication of how well entrenched JBoss is in the OEM space, Fleury said. Meantime, Fleury said the company will tap some of the $10 million in venture funding it received earlier this year to support open-source efforts in other ways. JBoss is launching JBoss Labs, an umbrella effort for research and development efforts in the open-source community that are more in a research mode right now. The effort is something of an incubator. An initial project under focus is a rich-client framework that works like Macromedia Inc.s Flex and the upcoming Avalon framework that will be in Microsofts Longhorn release of Windows, Fleury said. Will Avalon lock in users to Microsofts proprietary programs? Click here to read what Linux and Open Source Center Editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has to say on the matter. "Were early in the game," he said. "Were launching our own product, an open-source project under the GPL [General Public License]." Fleury said JBoss will work more with academics to turn their projects into technology that can be used commercially. "The usual criticism of open source is that its only in the commodity space, and that is not true," he said. "We also want to invest money, and we can sustain R&D and we can accelerate the rate of innovation." Fleury said JBoss will demonstrate a prototype of a JBoss implementation that supports Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, a new specification out of the Java Community Process. He also touted a recent major customer win with the French equivalent of the Internal Revenue Service. "Right now were growing organically," Fleury said. "Were federating open-source software. Were thinking about aiming to take proprietary software—perhaps through acquisitions—and moving it to open source. Were aching to try that model. We have the VC [venture capital] money, but were not touching it, only maybe to do an acquisition or something." Check out eWEEK.coms Developer & Web Services Center at http://developer.eweek.com for the latest news, reviews and analysis in programming environments and developer tools.

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