OW2 Consortium
OW2 Consortium logo | |
Formation | January 1, 2007 |
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Type | Consortium |
The OW2 Consortium (formed in January 2007 from the merger of the ObjectWeb Consortium and Orientware) is a not-for-profit, international consortium mainly devoted to producing open source middleware, EAI, e-business, clustering, grid computing. It was founded by INRIA, Groupe Bull, and France Télécom. OW2 aims at developing high-quality open-source components for distributed applications (Web applications, grid computing, clusters, business integration, nomadic systems, etc.).
At the end of 2009, OW2 merged with the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a primarily U.S.-based consortium of open source software companies with the mission of fostering the adoption of open source software in enterprise level companies.[1]
Contents
Mission
OW2 is devoted to developing distributed infrastructure software able to interconnect systems that are heterogeneous by nature. To this end, the software developed by OW2 complies with open standards established by independent bodies such as JCP, OMG or OSGi and grants open access to the source code by means of open source licenses. OW2 claims that the open source approach guarantees the best possible level of compliance with standards.
The aim of the consortium is promoting the dialogue between technology suppliers and user companies, in order to foster the emergence of an offering of professional solutions based on open-source infrastructure software together with the required services – such as training, advice and maintenance.
Various components, developed by the OW2 consortium, are connected together into the JOnAS JEE server. OW2 also has an Eclipse plugin to develop JEE applications (Lomboz).
Open Source Cloudware Initiative
In May 2010, OW2 and its three founding members, INRIA, Groupe Bull, and France Télécom, launched the OW2 Open Source CloudWare Initiative.[2] It is a community project designed to create an open, integrated suite of cloud computing infrastructure components based on open source software. The consortium opened the project to non-member contributors willing to donate open source code with permissive licensing and work to integrate their code with the rest of the OW2 Cloudware Stack.[3]