ObjectWeb seeks legal status to aid its growth

January 23, 2006—ObjectWeb, the European open source group that developed the Jonas application server, is hatching plans to become a legal entity in a move that could help the group to expand internationally, ObjectWeb documents show.

The group is currently a consortium of member organizations led by France Télécom SA, Bull SA, and the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA), which are bound together by contracts. ObjectWeb is not a legal entity today, and, as such, any contracts it enters into must be signed on its behalf by INRIA.

The group’s cofounders recently amended ObjectWeb’s consortium agreement to include the goal of becoming a nonprofit legal entity, according to documents on its Website dated Nov. 30. Such a move would allow ObjectWeb to sign its own contracts and set its own budget, among other things, and aims to help the group further its international expansion.

The plans are likely to be discussed further at the ObjectWeb Conference scheduled to begin Jan. 31 in Paris.

The move would be similar to a step taken last year by the Mozilla Foundation, distributor of the open source Firefox Web browser. The Foundation created a corporate subsidiary, Mozilla Corp., in part to simplify the management of its business contracts, it said.

ObjectWeb was created in 1999 to develop open source middleware for businesses, governments, and other organizations. It has about 5,000 members around the globe that can submit bug reports and contribute code to its projects.

Its best known project is Jonas, the Java Open Source Application Server, which is distributed by ObjectWeb member Red Hat as part of its server software stack. It has around 100 projects in all, including an enterprise service bus and an RFID (radio frequency identification) initiative.

The group is relatively well-known in Europe, but the ObjectWeb name is less recognized in North America and Asia. It does codevelopment work in China with the Guangzhou Middleware Research Center and the software group Orientware.