Geronimo is Certified

IBM's acquisition of Gluecode (read main contributors behind the Apache Geronimo project) is clearly giving a shot in the arm to Apache's J2EE application server. Apache Geronimo is now officially J2EE 1.4 certified. It would be interesting to see how this application server will hurt JBoss' growth. Although Geronimo is not nearly as mature or as popular as JBoss today, there are two things that could change that:

- First, IBM wants JBoss dead and they are putting the necessary resources behind Geronimo to improve it and close the gap with JBoss and I have to say they are showing frequent and rather fast progress.

- Second Geronimo is licensed under the Apache license which has less strings attached than LGPL (JBoss' license). LGPL, though not as "viral" as GPL, gets IT managers pretty nervous about its arguably blurry/open_for_interpretation implications. Some think LGPL still places too many requirements on organizations who modify and redistribute the code (check this thread out).

Bottom line: Geronimo joined JBoss and JOnAS (both LGPL) as fellow open source J2EE 1.4 certified servers. IMO, while J2EE certification helps ensure compatibility and interoperability, it doesn't necessarily make an app server enterprise ready. Here is the official list of certified app servers. Please share your thoughts as to how you think this OSS app server battle will play out.