During CISIS in Dalian (China), was recently held (June 23), the “2006 Sino-French International Cooperation Forum” subtitled : “Perspectives of international cooperation on open source software”. This forum was organized by the ObjectWeb and Orientware consortia, both devoted to developping middleware.
The forum was made possible by the Dalian IT industry international exchange association, the French Ministry of Industry, and MOST (Ministry of Science and Technology of China).
The fact that such a forum received some endorsement by both Chinese and French officials is a very positive sign. I hope that such cooperation will continue in years to come, maybe in other areas than middleware technology.
Anyway, for now, one perspective for such cooperation is through collaboration of OrientWare and ObjectWeb. Whereas ObjectWeb components are fully open source, it is not the case of most of OrientWare’s elements, as far as I can understand. But the Chinese seem to be interested in gaining worldwide audiance for their software, through publication as OpenSource. Also some components seem pretty complementary. Most of ObjectWeb technology is compliant to the JCP standards, whereas OrientWare seems to be much more of the OMG side, so adding all this in a cooperative space seems to provide a great coverage of middleware technologies. Please correct me if I’m wrong 😉
The presentations made at the forum are now online on ObjectWeb’s website (including my presentation of the Calibre project’s results, also available here).