OW2 Consortium


OW2 is an independent non-profit organization dedicated to developing open source code infrastructure for middleware enterprise information systems. OW2 federates IT vendors and users, universities, and research centers from Europe, Asia, and the Americas, representing thousands of IT professionals.

History

OW2 was founded in 2007 as an independent organization to foster the ObjectWeb code base of open source middleware. ObjectWeb was a joint project launched in 2002 by INRIA, Bull, and France Telecom; in 2005 INRIA signed an agreement with OrientWare, a joint project between Peking University, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, National University of Defense Technology, CVIC Software Engineering Co., Ltd, and the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All became founding members of OW2 along with Engineering, Red Hat, and Thales.

Services

OW2 offers three kinds of services:
1) Technical infrastructure:
OW2 provides developers with technical infrastructure, offering project hosting and providing a number of services to facilitate the collaborative work.
2) Community Services:
OW2 runs an open source governance system helping members connect with each other and with the international open source ecosystem at large. OW2 Governance provides the collaboration framework for its activities, namely, its Projects, Initiatives, and Local Chapters. As part of its governance efforts, OW2 develops its own project quality and assessment system made available as the Open Source Capability Assessment Radar and the Market Readiness Index.
3) Marketing Services:
OW2 engages in marketing activities to promote its brand, its code base and its members. OW2 regularly takes part in industry conferences and trade shows around the world including Cloud Expo Europe, Cloud Computing World Expo, FISL, FOSDEM, OpenStack Summit, OSCON, Paris Open Source Summit, etc. It also hosts its own yearly conference, known as OW2con.
In addition, OW2 provides information dissemination and community building services for R&D collaborative projects funded by European or French research programs.

Activities

Projects

OW2 hosts circa 100 open source projects spanning enterprise solutions and components, application frameworks, engineering tools, and libraries. Projects make up the OW2 code base and are foundation of all OW2 activities. Projects can be submitted into the OW2 code base after meeting some minimum requirements and applying. At this point, a Project is considered to be in "Incubation," the first of OW2's defined lifecycle stages. Upon gaining code contributors, growing, and meeting rigorous requirements, a Project can apply for "Mature" status. The application is then reviewed by the OW2 Technology Council and granted Mature status or kept in Incubation. If a Project stops evolving and updating, it can then be moved to the third lifecycle stage, "Archive," where it is no longer active but still benefits from OW2's infrastructure services.

Initiatives

Initiatives are joint efforts by multiple members targeted at meeting a common market need. Initiatives arise from examining market trends and identifying areas of need. Initiatives are constituted by several projects and facilitate their implementations into business solutions by systems integrators, OEMs, and end-users.

Local Chapters

A Local Chapter is a group of OW2 members who combine their efforts to promote the goals of the consortium within a community characterized by its geography or language. Current OW2 Local Chapters can be found throughout Europe, China, Brazil, and North America.

OW2con

OW2con is OW2's global annual conference for the OW2 community and IT professionals, organized since 2009. Topics of the two-day conference are open source software for enterprise information systems, cloud computing, big data, privacy and security, and accessibility. Traditionally held in Paris, each annual conference is focussed on a new central theme.