There's been a lot of Java-based spin around the splintering of the team that developed the JBoss open-source Java app server this summer. Some of the developers on the core dev team for JBoss spun themselves off as The Core Developer Network LLC in August, reportedly unhappy with life under the JBoss Group flag. Then their access rights to the code versioning system were cut off. The result was a “fork” in JBoss' code–JBossGroup continues its development, and the JBoss team at CDN continues on a separate path, now called Elba (since JBoss is a trademark of JBoss Group's Marc Fleury).

Elba was originally intended (by the CDN crew) to be an effort to incorporate The Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo Project with the JBoss code; now, it's a placeholder (and source of revenue) for CDN while it contributes to Geronimo itself, independent of JBoss code. Geronimo is to be Apache's Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) server, which it hopes to certify with Sun as J2EE-compliant. The Apache Software Foundation is in no way connected to Elba–and wants nothing to do with it.

Meanwhile, The JBoss Group is trying, now, to get certified itself. Bob Bickle, once of Bluestone and then of HP Middleware (killed by Carly Fiorina post-merger), is now the VP of biz dev for JBoss, and he, as he put it to me today, “drew the short straw” to negotiate certification licensing with Sun. He says the the move was driven by a change in JBoss's user base (more actual deployments by businesses); others outside the company suggest that the real reason is to get certified before Geronimo.

Clearly, no love was lost in the breakup. Marc Fleury said to me today in a phone interview: “The two guys working over there (Geronimo) were mediocre guys at JBoss.” He suggested they were purged because they weren't up to the transition of the project to “professional open source.”