Earlier this morning Adobe announced their intention to acquire Switzerland-based Day Software, makers of the Web Content Management (WCM) products. Day Software contributes a lot to open source, including major contributions to the Jackrabbit, Sling, Chemistry, and other Apache open source projects that serve as a foundation for their products.
Adobe, on the other hand, is known for their proprietary products, including CS5, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and the Flash platform and development tools, but not really well-known as an open-source company. The FAQ on the acquisition doesn’t really mention open source (or Apache), so it was interesting to read Jukka Zitting’s take. Jukka is a committer on multiple Apache projects and is an Apache mentor and PMC chair for Jackrabbit.
People outside of Adobe and Day are also raising questions about what this means, especially when the news comes with no mention of Day’s open source contributions. Boris Kraft, CTO at Magnolia International (another CMS/WCM vendor), gave his impressions of the deal. Magnolia a nice product (which we use at JBoss.org) that runs on top of a JCR repository. As Boris mentions, Magnolia currently uses Jackrabbit but is really independent of any single JCR – and can in fact run on ModeShape.
Do your projects or products use Jackrabbit, and if so does this news give you concern? There’s no better time to look at ModeShape, the open source JCR 2.0 repository that bundles in federation, sequencing, and whole host of other slick features.
Filed under: jcr, news, open source, repository
ModeShape 