The Codehaus was formally registered on 26 February, 2003. Bob had been active in open-source for several years, with projects such as Jaxen and Drools. For a while, The Werken Company hosted his projects along with the projects of a handful of other developers. The Codehaus “brand” was created to allow for a neutral environment for non-Werken people to host their projects. Mostly, this was due to several folks thinking that Xulux was a project of The Werken Company since it was hosted on our server. The Codehaus helped to correct that misconception. Kurt Schrader publically announced the existance of the Codehaus a wee bit before Bob was ready for it. Oh well.

Jason van Zyl was sharing the cost of the Werken hardware and didn’t object to the formation of the Codehaus and is thus honored with the title of The First Hausmate.

So, things trucked along for a while until folks from ThoughtWorks started sending me mails. Paul Hammant, Joe Walnes and Aslak Hellesøy migrated and initiated some projects, With the advent of PicoContainer, the reputation (good? bad?) of the Codehaus took off.

Bob decided to go spend some time in Amsterdam, and the seed for the idea of the First Irregular Haus Party was planted. In October, 2003, over a dozen hausmates from across the globe assembled in Amsterdam for a weekend of brain-storming, pair programming, presentations about projects, and general socializing. It was at the Haus Party that Groovy was publically birthed.

Around the New Year of 2004, Bob travelled to Guelph, Ontario to arrange for a new hosting providing at Sentex. The new provider allowed for a much larger machine (beaver.codehaus.org), much more bandwidth, and much fewer dollars. Plus, we’re billed in those small Canadian dollars.