wow, IBM buys gluecode. I am impressed for the team. It probably also implies that Geronimo will become the official OSS J2EE server on the IBM product line, indeed, a product that can now have an "IBM" stamp of approval.

At the same time, I worry. First, I worry if this was a decision forced by the success of JBoss. That is, Geronimo will now become a product targeted at JBoss. Think about it. WebSphere brings in oodles of cash for IBM Global services, and quality OSS alternatives threaten that revenue. JBoss was getting traction, and may not have been "high end enterprise grade", but neither was Linux a few years back, or before that, Windows. Never forget the threat posed by low-priced, mass-market software.

If IBM-branded Geronimo-derived products ship with the stuff that JBoss charges for (i.e., good documentation), it puts a big hole in the revenue stream of JBoss. A bit like the one that MS put into Netscape by giving away IE. And that's a scary thought. Is JBoss succeeding so well against WebSphere that it is worth IBM spending $100M+ to kill it, or at least stop it in its tracks.

This leads to an interesting problem. The rationale for Geronimo over JBoss was that it would be more open, less vulnerable to the whims of its owner vendor. Instead, even though IBM haven't bought ownership of the Geronimo code, they do own the core developers. And every contribution made by third parties in the OSS codebase ends up benefiting the IBM distro. That is the price of the BSD license: you don't need to publish your additions, but everyone else has the same right. Which is precisely why (L)GPL makes so much sense for startups trying to retain control of their software. MIT/BSD/Apache licenses are good for universal adoption, but not retaining control of "strategic" technologies. (*)

Where then, is the moral high ground of the Apache Geronimo stack? I think Jonas has it. It also makes me worry that Apache is, through no action of its own, going to be perceived as a tool of IBM in its ongoing war with Sun, and now, JBoss. But that is, in its own way, a metric of how OSS is transforming the Java and app server economy.

(*) I note that tactical technologies live quite happily under the BSD/Apache license; Ant's current problem is dealing with the vast number of contributed tasks, not with IDE vendors forking their own version.