SpringSource Moves dm Server to Eclipse.org and EPL License with Project Virgo

Posted by Scott Delap on Jan 12, 2010

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Development,

Operations & Infrastructure

Topics

Java ,

Application Servers

Tags

SpringSource dm Server ,

SpringSource ,

OSGi ,

Eclipse

This morning SpringSource announce the submission of the Virgo project at Eclipse.org. If accepted, this would result in the conversion of SpringSource's dm Server to the renamed Virgo project under <a href="http://eclipse.org/eclipsert/">EclipseRT</a>. It would then be fully licensed under the EPL (Eclipse Public License) in contrast to its current GPL form. From SpringSource's Adrian Colyer:

What does this mean for users of dm Server?

The move to Eclipse.org has a number of practical implications for users of dm Server:

• Project hosting, home pages, forums, and downloads will all be moved to Eclipse.org infrastructure
• The license will change from the current (largely) GPL license, to the Eclipse Public License (EPL)
• It will be much easier for other organizations and community members to get involved in the ongoing development of Virgo

The combination of the license change and community hosting at Eclipse.org opens the codebase to a much broader set of users and developers.

The follow-on (2.1) release of dm Server will be developed and released from Eclipse.org.

Why is SpringSource making this change?

...There is a great deal of interest and innovation around enterprise OSGi and the dm Server. This interest is strongest amongst early adopters, and projects with requirements that match closely to the dynamically modular nature of the OSGi Service Platform. For a mainstream development team though, who just want to build an enterprise application as quickly as possible, and with as little hassle as possible, the costs currently associated with adopting enterprise OSGi can outweigh the short-term benefits. This situation needs to be addressed before enterprise OSGi can become the de-facto approach for mainstream enterprise application development...

The Eclipse Foundation's Executive Director Mike Milinkovich also applauds the move:

The past couple of years, “establish Eclipse runtime technology as the leading open source runtime platform” has been on the top of the list of the strategic goals of the Eclipse Foundation. The recently announced Gemini project — and now Virgo — go a long way towards realizing that vision.

InfoQ sat down with Adam Fitzgerald Director of Developer Relations at SpringSource to discuss the announcement further. Fitzgerald echoed Adrian's statements that the creation of the Virgo project is primarily driven by the desire to increase use of OSGi in the enterprise. SpringSource is happy to be assisting Eclipse in the possibly fulfillment of one of their 2010 goals of Eclipse runtime technology becoming a leading open source platform. He noted that lack of broad OSGi adoption and a fragmentation of implementations was hindering its growth. Hopefully Virgo will increase adoption and be more attractive to participation and contributions from other industry companies.

Fitzgerald also indicated that SpringSource would be contributing the tooling pieces of dm Server to the appropriate Eclipse projects such as WTP. In regards to the existing commercial users of dm Server he confirmed that SpringSource would continue to offer commercial support for what is becoming the Vertigo project. Finally InfoQ asked about Virgo direction going forward. Fitzgerald indicated that while SpringSource would be continuing to actively support development and provide advice on where it should head, those decisions would be left to the project. He noted that one possibly future enhancement the project might undertake would be pluggable web container support to allow the use of Eclipse's own Jetty in addition to the currently supported Tomcat.

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   Virgo is under the Eclipse Runtime (EclipseRT) project

   by Chris Aniszczyk

   "If accepted, this would result in the conversion of SpringSource's dm Server to a top level Eclipse project that would be fully licensed under the EPL...

   
   
   This isn't correct, Virgo will exist under the Eclipse Runtime (EclipseRT) project at Eclipse.
   
   eclipse.org/eclipsert/

   Reply

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