From this otherwise interesting C:Net article about the Sun v JBoss thing, comes the following choice quote:

Enforcing J2EE compliance is important, because IT buyers care about being able to move Java applications to different systems, said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research. ...

False. Complete, and utter bullshit. The overwhelming majority of J2EE development is being done in bespoke systems, where the deployment platform is decided a long time before development even begins. Cross-deployment is never an issue. Cross-compatibility of developer skills is important, so you have a bigger pool of development talent to hire from, but developers are far easier to adapt to incompatibilities than software is.

Of course, Schadler backs up quite a way in the next sentence:

... But compliance is generally seen more as a buyer's "check-list item" as opposed to a technological necessity, he said.

"I think the portability question is more important on paper than it is in reality," Schadler said. But "the brand is worth something. If any Tom, Dick or Harry can say that they are J2EE-compliant, that's a problem."

The pundit is having a bet each way. The first line is the party-line, regurgitated from Sun's press-release (this is what ‘analysts’ from places like Gartner and Forrester do: consume press-releases and condense them into research papers). Then comes two sentences of back-pedaling, and then a sentence of back-pedaling from the original back-pedaling. An analytical double-backwards somersault, in the pike position.

The result: a confused, meaningless babble posing as informed commentary.

My take on all this? The J2EE brand is meaningless. Compliance has never been a major reason for choosing or rejecting an application server (trust me on this, I've worked with Websphere since v3.0). Sun have realised that the application server brands: Websphere, Weblogic, Oracle, JBoss, Orion, are all more significant than the J2EE brand itself, and they're desperately fighting for the mark's relevance.