Open Source Blog

The launch of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise earlier this week saw Novell drop JBoss AS from the package list in favour of Apache Geronimo, a surprise move given that Novell had maintained its commitment to JBoss in April despite its acquisition by Linux rival Red Hat.

In a statement, Novell's director of marketing for Linux and open platform solutions, Justin Steinman, blamed a change of licensing terms. "JBoss changed some of its license terms, which made it difficult to include JBoss in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10," he stated.

JBoss CTO, Sacha Labourey, has denied that any such change has taken place. "I was surprised as well," he told me. "To be frank, there is no change in the license. There is no change for us, no change in the business relationship as well."

Labourey said he was unable to shed any light on what Novell had taken exception to. We await clarification from Novell.

In the meantime, Labourey also maintained that despite its new role as a division of Red Hat, there is no change in JBoss's commitment to heterogeneous environments. "The change here is mostly of the Red Hat side, he explained. "We have said to those guys 'we need to get support for Windows, Novell SUSE , HP-UX' et cetera."

Labourey also welcomed Novell's commitment to support JBoss on SUSE Linux Enterprise, and maintained that the exclusion of JBoss AS from the SLES 10 package list would have any effect on JBoss deployments.

"Supporting customers is an important point. I am not sure that customers just use the software provided in the distribution," he said. "I'm not sue this will impact us this much."

As for Geronimo as a JBoss alternative, Labourey said it was "a non-issue" at this point, noting that Geronimo is at version 1.1 while JBoss AS is preparing for version 5.0.

He also likened IBM and Novell's adoption of Geronimo to JBoss owner Red Hat's previous attempt to turn JOnAS into a serious contender. "What Red Hat did in the past is precisely what drives [Novell and IBM] to Geronimo," he said. "Trying to use the brand to pick up a second player and grow it to be the leader."

As Red Hat found out, he noted, that might be easier said than done.