BEA has finished the last set of OpenJPA code drops to the Apache Incubator. All source code in the repository now compiles. From an earlier InfoQ article:
OpenJPA will be an enterprise grade JPA implementaiton suitable for production use. In addition to the JPA API it will also extend the JPA with features from Kodo including custom lock groups, dynamic fetch group configuration, custom mapping capabilities, Kodo save point capabilities, DB level save points, programmatic access to introspection of named queries, caching and even Kodo's built-in distributed cache implementation with hooks to plug in Tangosol's Coherence.
Some Kodo IP will be reserved for use in WebLogic Server and the commercial Kodo product, such as management and monitoring tools, more aggressive caching and scalability algorithms, deploy time and runtime features.
Neelan Choksi provides an update on the Kodo to OpenJPA transition on his blog:
Where this really gets interesting is also one of the reasons that we took a while to get the code out there. We had to refactor some of Kodo code so that the next release of Kodo will basically sit on top of OpenJPA. Not wanting to maintain separate code bases, BEA decided that OpenJPA will be the basis for all future versions of Kodo. This is pretty major news because the next release of Kodo will also be included as part of the next major release of WebLogic Server (code named "Dante") as its O/R mapping engine. This should give customers a comfort level and a sense of confidence in this open source project that it will be around for a while and it has commitment from BEA as well as a number of our friends in other organizations. I am sure you will be seeing announcements in the near future about the support that the community will be throwing behind OpenJPA and am truly excited about this being a cross-community project and not just a BEA project.
By providing OpenJPA under the business friendly Apache Software License, OpenJPA may present a viable alternative to Hibernate (earlier InfoQ article with a lively discussion).