Thursday, June 26, 2008

JTS and WS-TX implementations go LGPL

Back when ArjunaTS was acquired by JBoss the decision was made to licence the core transaction engine (ArjunaCore) and the local JTA under LGPL, but use GPL for the OTS (JTS) implementation as well as for XTS, our Web Services Transactions component. There were some strategic decisions at the time (a dual-licence model) that made sense for JBoss, but with the Red Hat acquisition we've been reconsidering. As a result, the next release of JBossTS will be entirely based on LGPL, i.e., there will no longer be any GPL component. Hopefully this will satisfy those users and customers out there who wanted to use JTS or XTS but found that they were uncomfortable with GPL. From a community perspective, let's also hope that this helps encourage everyone to get behind JBossTS and continue to ensure it is the premier open source transaction engine out there. Next step: Project Blacktie.