January 1, the France-based open-source consortium ObjectWeb merged with the Chinese IT institute OrientWare to create a new entity, called OW2. ObjectWeb was launched in 2002 as a joint project between INRIA, Bull and France Telecom, before evolving to a more global organisation. OrientWare was created in 2004 as a consortium of Chinese universities and software companies.
In September 2005, ObjectWeb and OrientWare signed an agreement by which they committed to share their code base and jointly develop open source middleware software. Among the main open source software solutions developed by OW2 you find Lomboz, Sync4j, eXo Platform, JOnAS, XWiki or Enhydra
This is good that organisations working in the open source area join their forces to produce improved solutions with a global perspective and a worldwide pool of talent. Some major open source projects (Eclipse, JBoss, PHP) have strong commercial companies backing them so I think that this is good to have an organisation with a different perspective involved in the open source world, maybe backing projects that have perhaps less visible commercial impacts.
