Developers from ObjectWeb, an international non-profit consortium of government and businesses focused on development of Open Source middleware technologies, and the Apache Software Foundation, a 501c3 non-profit organization also dedicated to the development of Open Source technologies, have agreed to collaborate to speed up the availability and certification of their Open Source J2EE application servers.

An agreement in principle was established during the ApacheCon conference in Las Vegas, NV, on November 17, 2003. Now that agreement has been ratified by the release of two middleware components from ObjectWeb under a new license in order to enable their reuse by the Apache Software Foundation developers.

ObjectWeb and the Apache Software Foundation both work on Open Source implementations of J2EE, the main standard for Java application servers. Their projects are respectively named JOnAS and Geronimo. JOnAS has been used in production for years and currently implements J2EE 1.3 plus some features of J2EE 1.4. Geronimo is a new project launched on August 6, 2003 and is still in the Apache "incubator". Both JOnAS and Geronimo aim at being officially certified as J2EE 1.4 compliant by Sun next year.

While the goals of the ObjectWeb consortium and the Apache Software Foundation are very similar, they typically release software under different licenses, the LGPL and the Apache License respectively. While the Apache License allows ObjectWeb to use Apache code within the LGPL-licensed JOnAS server, the LGPL did not allow Apache to use ObjectWeb's code under the Apache License within Geronimo.

Application servers like JOnAS or Geronimo are assemblies of software components. JOnAS already relies on components developed by the Apache Software Foundation (e.g. Tomcat, a Java servlet container). ObjectWeb decided to depart from its licensing policy so to enable in return Geronimo developers to use some ObjectWeb components. For this reason, JOTM (a Java transaction manager) and ASM (a Java byte-code manipulation framework) are from now on distributed under the BSD license, which is compatible with the Apache License.

The collaboration will speed up both JOnAS and Geronimo evolution. For ObjectWeb, the uptake of JOTM and ASM by the Apache Software Foundation is a major recognition by its peers. This will contribute to increase the industrial adoption of key middleware components on which JOnAS is built. For Geronimo, the integration of ready-made components will lighten the development effort as encouraged by the philosophy of Open Source.