GEELAN: You really believe that with a passion, that it's not just a manner of speaking, this community. The JBoss community is real and will not take any BS from...

FRICKE: No, that's one thing I've learned at JBoss, these guys know what they need to solve business problems, to solve development type problems, and they're not going to take force-fed technology to satisfy vendor needs. That's not going to work.

GEELAN: Change imposed is change opposed.

FRICKE: Right. What's going to happen is, I think you're going to see things like JBoss Seam, the new Web application framework that Gavin King has been leading, that marries EJB with JavaServer Faces, eliminates the glue code, incorporates jBPM for workflow, that's real exciting. You have this Web application environment that can do lots of different things in a very simple way including manage stateful type application environments, including workflow type scenarios in which you've have to go buy process servers at $20,000, a processor for other kinds of environments. That has been driven by the community because there's a real need to do things beyond the simple Web application framework we've seen in the past couple years. There's a need to really bring that level of simplicity to a larger scale of problem. That's what JBoss Seam is about. JBoss Seam will be pulled into the community as one of the key SOA component foundations, I think. Developers are going to love this development.

I went on the road with Gavin King and the JBoss operations network people. We did On The Road, a road show, kind of a good play on words. When Gavin got up there and presented Seam, you could hear a pin drop, guys were just -

GEELAN: - blown away.

FRICKE: There were just smiles on the faces and excitement in the room. It was just incredible. You don't see that with these multi-headed hybrid hydra kind of consortium type of things that produce specifications, right? You just don't see that level of excitement.

GEELAN: This does kind of make my case that this particular moment of the cycle, it does seem to be enormously pregnant in a way that I haven't noticed for three or four years. Now JBoss is another use case for my great theory, so I'm going to absolutely keep a very, very close view, if I may, Pierre, and perhaps pursue this as a theme through this year, because obviously JBoss is part of the greater picture and as it becomes great, it would be nice to keep you humble and, because we want this kind of ecosystem view, we'll have to keep you honest, too.

FRICKE: Absolutely. We need that.

GEELAN: In the meantime, I want to thank Pierre Fricke for talking to SYS-CON.TV.