Open Source Weblog

Earlier this week Novell launched SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and in doing so dropped the JBoss AS from its distribution package list in favour of Apache Geronimo.

Explaining the decision, Novell's director of marketing for Linux and open platform solutions, Justin Steinman, blamed a change of licensing terms.

"There are going to be two major open source Java platforms in the future: one will be JBoss, and the other will be Geronimo. JBoss changed some of its license terms, which made it difficult to include JBoss in SUSE Linux Enterprise 10," he stated.

That claim led to a denial from JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey that any license change had occurred. "To be frank, there is no change in the license. There is no change for us, no change in the business relationship as well," he told me.

Novell's Steinman has got back to us to explain Novell's position, and it now seems that the problem was not a change of license for JBoss, put a potential problem with the license used by components in JBoss AS 4.0 that were not in JBoss 3.2.3, which had been included with Novell Linux Desktop and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9.

"As part of the SUSE Linux Enterprise development process, we evaluate the licensing for each package that we ship in our distribution. While packages like JBoss are distributed under the LGPL license, there are many components which are proprietary technologies from third parties," he stated.

"We found several components in JBoss4 that fit this profile. We checked with JBoss and the two areas in question, the SRP security extensions and the application client, ship under licenses that have questionable redistribution rights for Novell," he added.

"We didn't want to modify the JBoss package and we couldn't get legal clarification until March 29, 2006. At that time, it was too late to include JBoss4 in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, as the SLES 10 beta test was well underway."

Which explains why JBoss was omitted from SLES 10, if not the claim that "JBoss changed some of its license terms". Anyway, Steinman was also at pains to point out that the decision did not have anything to do with JBoss's acquisition by Red Hat.

"Our decision not to ship JBoss4 in SLES10 was made on March 29. The Red Hat acquisition of JBoss was announced on April 10. There is no connection between the removal of JBoss4 from SLES10 and the acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat," he stated.

Following the acquisition of JBoss by Red Hat, Novell stated that it would continue to work with JBoss and it is worth noting that Novell has pledged to continue to support JBoss on SLES.

"SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 will continue to support JBoss, and Novell will continue to provide technical support for JBoss as per our existing contract with JBoss," said Steinman earlier this week.

The statement was welcomed by Labourey. "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," he responded.