TheOpenAnalyst

During the OSCAMP event in Beijing, I had a chance to talk to Cedric Thomas, the CEO of OW2 open source organization. Here’s an extract of our conversation:

1. Can you tell me about the origins of the OW2 Consortium? We hear OW2 is the result of a merger between OrientWare and ObjectWeb.
In 2002, a joint open source community project between Bull, France Telecom and INRIA was launched under the name ObjectWeb, with an initial life span of three years. In the meantime, in 2004, a group of world-class Chinese universities launched OrientWare, a comparable project in China. Both projects focused on developing open source middleware.

ObjectWeb has quickly grown into an international community and, in 2005, when the question of an independent financial model arose, the sponsors, INRIA, Bull and France Telecom, called me in to help define the future organization ad draft its development plan. This plan was broadly debated with the community throughout 2006, while I also implemented the transition from the old to the new organization. That year we had extensive discussions with our friends at OrientWare and it became obvious that a merge was the best way to create a truly global community.

The new organization, OW2, was launched in January 2007 as a non-profit organization. But its code base and its community goes back to the early 2000.

A look at the open source OW2 Consortium | ZDNet Asia

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