As my reader have learn by my last post I (and Alessio) have just donated Wise (and LMS) to JBoss.org.

But what does it mean? And more important why?

What does it mean?

Wise has been since the beginning released on LGPL license. Of course donating our code to JBoss.org we haven’t changed nothing about license. Wise still be an open source project and neither is changed, you still have code, you still have a business friendly open source license.

Code donation just change the Intellectual Property owners, switching from us to JBoss, divison of Red Hat. So it seems we are leaving all what we have on this project, but we are doing that for some good reasons.

And what does it mean for the project? More or less nothing. We are not donating and leaving project, but we will be active members (more precisely I’m going to lead the project). The good news are two new contributors from JBoss world are lending a hand with the code.

Why?

The real question is why have I decided to donate? Well, I’ve used “we” until now because Alessio and me have generally agreed on this donation. I’m switching to first singular person because Alessio kindly give me last word on the donation both because his position could condition him and because all last code written to transform wise from a general web client to zero code web service client easily integrable in a lot of server side application comes by me.

Reasons are essentially 4:

• Wise is essentially an hacking against jbossws and jax-ws tools. Quite frankly I believe a pure hacking could be good for a personal use project, which more or less have been for years Wise. But when Wise have gotten a lot of interest integrating with the (cool) jbossesb project my point of view has changed. The question is: is possible to maintain wise and add features without having a strict join with jbossws and/or jbossesb with which is strictly dependent/integrated? And are there any better way to get it joined than make Wise a JBoss.org project? More users have been using Wise, and I have gotten some good feedback, but I think they need a serious approach of the project ensuring them Wise will not break (or at lest it will have great chance to don’t) it compatibility and interoperability which are the main reasons a lot of users is coming to us.
• Becoming a JBoss.org project Wise would probably have a larger and greater community. It should mean more and better feedbacks and contribution (already verified since we have gotten 2 new contributors). More feedbacks and contribution mean better software and it’s all what I care.
• I believe JBoss open source model is good. I think what they call professional open source is great. Maybe not all will agree with me, but it’s my own thoughts. It’s not planned at the moment, but I wouldn’t have any problem if one day Wise would be included in a JBoss product and someone will pay for support. Moreover I think it would be great, and for sure I wouldn’t have sufficient time to provide a professional support to them. I think open source is great, but home made product haven’t a real future, they need some kind of support, some company behind. I hope JBoss could be the company behind Wise.
• Last but not least because I’m honoured of JBoss’s interest on my project. A lot of the strength spurring on an open source developer is narcissism And I can ensure you sometimes it’s really needed with a little daughter and a lovely wife (with a great sense of humour) saying “ok, you don’t smoke, but you write code”

Have I taken a mistake? I don’t believe so. Anyway Wise is not going to an end, but to a bright new beginning: we have a lot of ideas, both increasing wise current capability and adding totally new features making it much more useful both in its traditional world (web services client/test) and in some new way I’m currently exploring and I’ll post about very soon. Stay tuned, and please join us and our building community contributing on our public forums, reporting bugs or writing some code. BTW Wise now have its own blog even if I’ll continue to cross post here for a while for wise’s older fans .

Moreover we are not discontinuing this blog where we will continue to post our experiences and point of views not necesseraly related to Wise (BTW the two most read posts aren’t about Wise, but subversion branching and a new approach to unit tests).

Stay tuned.