News.com reports about some of the pragmatic (as opposed to emotional) motivations behind the Core Developer's Network (CDN):

Sundstrom said he and his partners decided to form the company based on support and consulting services experiences with JBoss Group, where they saw the limitations of being tied to a single software product. Customers needed help integrating multiple systems, Sundstrom said, and JBoss wasn't always the right answer.

"We wanted to move beyond the single-vendor approach," he said. "We've got a lot of customers dealing with integration issues, which is really the biggest hurdle they have. They're picking the best technology from the open-source world, whether it's JBoss or something else, and they're mixing it with closed-source technology, and they need it to all work together."

Interesting business insight, perhaps the JBoss Group failed to appreciate this point. 

Meanwhile, another splinter group this time from JCorporate announces their Keel framework.  Keel is described as "a highly extensible backbone for integrating Java projects".  Their website is extremely insightful, they point out a list of Anti-Patterns of open source projects and provide their solutions.  So beyond just having a vision, they actually have a concrete solution.

Keel provides another spin on the Microkernel approach, that is leverage an existing Microkernel (i.e. Avalon) and build a framework that integrates other open source projects under a single umbrella.  This "Meta-Architecture" approach, an architecture to connect architectures, seems like an extremely compelling business vision.  Matter of fact, Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun, is saying the same thing!