The Community OpenORB Project History

The Community OpenORB has its roots in the Distributed Object Group's JavaORB, a pure-Java, open-source CORBA ORB.

The JavaORB project was initiated by Jerome Daniel in October 1998. In March 1999, version 1.0 was released. In the same month, he founded the Distributed Object Group (DOG) together with Xavier Blanc, Nicolas Charpentier, and Vincent Vallee.

In May 1999 negotiations with ExOffice Technologies, Inc. about a strategic partnership started for cooperatively developing new versions of the JavaORB project. In July 1999 version 2.0 of the JavaORB was released. During the following months several CORBA services and various enhancements to the JavaORB's core were added. In February 2000 Olivier Modica joined the DOG team.

• History of the Distributed Object Group (DOG)
• DOG mailing-list archive

In May 2000, the whole DOG became part of ExOffice Technologies, Inc. Around the same time Chris Wood, an employee with ExOffice Technologies, Inc., joined the team. In June 2000 the company ExOffice Technologies, Inc. was renamed to Intalio, Inc. The sponsored open source projects were supported by Intalio as part of their Exolab Group. In July 2000 the DOG at Intalio, Inc. was extended by another member, Marina Daniel.

In May 2000, the project moved to the Exolab Group and released under the name of OpenORB in August 2000. The OpenORB team consisted of Jerome Daniel, Marina Daniel, Olivier Modica, and Chris Wood. (Part of the mailing-list archive can be found here)

The whole team was working on a new version of JavaORB named OpenORB. After several months of in-house development OpenORB was released at www.openorb.org.

Release History

After nine months the OpenORB project had proven to be successful. Public visibility was increasing steadily and the community had grown to a respectable size.

In late 2001, Intalio's support of OpenORB stopped as they refocused their efforts due to the dotcom burst. Bug fixes stopped and the mailing list traffic dwindled.

That was the time when a few OpenORB community members decided to get more involved into the project. The movement was led by Stephen McConnell and Michael Rumpf. The idea was to get Intalio to turn the OpenORB project into a real, community driven, open-source project after the example of many Apache projects. Unfortunately, no agreement was reached with Intalio for doing this. As a result on January 8th 2002, the OpenORB project was forked and established at SourceForge as The Community OpenORB. The new project was founded by Stephen McConnell, Michael Rumpf, Shawn Boyce, Jesper Pedersen, J. Scott Evans, and Viacheslav Tararin

Soon after the formation of The Community OpenORB project version 1.2.1 of the OpenORB suite was released on January 11th 2002. This version included many bug-fixes over the Intalio source base that had been released on August 15th 2001 for the last time.

On June 8th 2002, Ashish Agrawal, VP. of Engineering at Intalio,Inc. sent an email to the open-source communities of the various Exolab projects sponsored by Intalio announcing the official end of their support. Regarding OpenORB: "We support the project on Sourceforge and recommend any contributors to contribute to this project. OpenORB will no longer be hosted on Exolab."

Since the beginning of The Community OpenORB project, substantial changes have been made to the source base. Since early 2002 the circle of active developers grew to over 10, not including the people contributing patches. The number of users, subscribed to the openorb-user mailing-list, grew to over 100, the downloads have passed 15.000. On September 30th version 1.3.0 was released to the community.