The French National Center for Scientific Research (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS) announced its membership in ObjectWeb , an international nonprofit consortium of companies and research organizations who have joined forces to produce next-generation open source middleware.

In a distributed computing system, middleware is defined as the software layer that lies between the operating system and the applications on each site of the system. Middleware is a cornerstone of software infrastructures in the Information Society. The software developed by the ObjectWeb community complies with open standards established by independent bodies. Open access to the source code, as allowed by the open-source licenses, guarantees the best possible level of compliance with these standards.

ObjectWeb is recognized as one of the main forces in cooperative middleware development at a worldwide level. From the beginning, CNRS teams were actively involved in its foundation, but CNRS itself was not a member of the consortium. The membership agreement between ObjectWeb and CNRS makes this involvement official and allows all CNRS laboratories to be more present in the evolution of the consortium. This partnership brings together public research and industrial R&D in a model of international success in the very competitive field of software infrastructures for the Information Society.

Co-founded by INRIA, Bull and France Telecom in 2002, the ObjectWeb consortium federates over sixty companies and research laboratories, shepherds over 100 software components and leads a community of hundreds professionals from around the world. ObjectWeb is hosted and represented by INRIA and chaired by Bull. Along with CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission), CNRS and INRIA recently acknowledged the importance of open source software by creating together an open source license, called Cecill , which is in conformance with French law, while perfectly suited to international projects.

ObjectWeb is an open-source software community created at the end of 1999 by Bull, France Telecom R&D and INRIA. Its goal is the development of open-source distributed middleware, in the form of flexible and adaptable components. These components range from specific software frameworks and protocols to integrated platforms. ObjectWeb developments follow a systematic component-based approach.