It’s been a good few weeks for stories and information about JBoss Rules and Drools, the open source project upstream of the JBoss subscription offering. Here is a quick summary of the recent stories. Post a comment if you know of any others we all should pay attention to.
“How do I get our software in to Fedora?”
This question has been a common one over the last year, brought to various parts of Fedora and Red Hat from software developers, community managers, and product teams working on open source software for various ISVs. Now that OpenJDK 6 is Java EESE 6 TCK certified, there is an even greater incentive for Java ISVs to get closer to the Fedora way of doing things. If your language has a free and open source implementation, it is probably in Fedora and might already be available in Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL.) For example, take a look at how many Perl modules are available (I count 359 for el5, 236 for el4.)
Fedora anticipated this attention from ISVs when it created the EPEL project. In EPEL, package maintainers can branch any software and it’s dependencies for a special repository that provides Fedora packages for specific versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
In one move, Fedora created a new and unique repository that has a compelling pathway for contributions. Fedora’s EPEL has a niche amongst repositories — be like Enterprise Linux. Focus on security updates and bug fixes to packages, not rebasing to the latest from the upstream project. This makes it possible for a contributor community to maintain nearly 1500 EPEL packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and nearly 3000 EPEL packages for Enterprise Linux 5. Some of these packages may get branched for an Enterprise Linux update.
The answer to the how do I? question comes to this:
Along the way, you have an opportunity to grow a community around the open source software that matters the most to you. Getting software in to Fedora means a six to eighteen month jump on the Enterprise Linux beta. You can develop your software along with the operating system it runs on, and you may be able to help influence how other parts of Fedora are created.
(Edited to change “Java EE” to “Java SE”; OpenJDK 6 is Java SE compliant.)
A previous post, How to get OpenJDK 6 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, covered how to install OpenJDK for Fedora Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) 5. Now these instructions are at an even easier URL to remember:
http://openjdk.java.net/install/#fedora
These instructions cover installing OpenJDK 6 for Fedora 9 and EPEL 5, as well as IcedTea 7 for Fedora 8. IcedTea 7 provides the OpenJDK 7 development branch with IcedTea components to make it build under Fedora using entirely open source components. The package name remains the same in the repository, despite the trademark agreement allowing the OpenJDK mark to be used by Fedora, because it is considered too disruptive to rename it now.
Dev Fu focuses on the fresh and free OpenJDK 6 in Fedora 9 (Sulphur) because this is great news for developers. Especially developers who want to use the best software because it’s free and it doesn’t suck. However, there is much more of interest for developers than just OpenJDK:
For a good general overview of Fedora 9, read Fedora Project Leader Paul W. Frields article in Red Hat Magazine, “Fedora 9: Get yours and get involved“. The full feature list for Fedora 9 is also a good read.
With a laundry list of project names and descriptions, even an enterprise architect has to spend some time to form a mental picture of how the parts become the whole. This is just what the JBoss.org team has done, and they have a new clickable projects diagram on the JBoss.org community projects page. Seen below, it visually explains how the various standards, common components, and JBoss.org project parts become the whole JBoss story.
