Earlier this year, SUSE LINUX became a Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) source licensee, acquiring the right to distribute Sun's Java Virtual Machine (JVM). As an ObjectWeb corporate member, SUSE LINUX will gain privileged access to the community of developers of many middleware components and platforms, including JOnAS, a Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) server, and Enhydra, another Java application server distributed by ObjectWeb.

"The first milestone of our initiative is to provide a version of a true open-source web application server on SUSE LINUX, supporting users who wish to deploy a full open-source stack as well as those who prefer a mix of proprietary and open-source software", stated Juergen Geck, SUSE's Chief Technology Officer. "Open-source is about choice, about flexibility, and we believe that this choice will benefit to the industry."

Distributed under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) by ObjectWeb, JOnAS implements the functionality set forth in J2EE and has proven itself in production environment. JOnAS comes with free documentation and examples. This makes it the only true non-profit open-source application server to provide the J2EE 1.3 functionality, with already some features anticipating J2EE 1.4.