The field is growing. There are three major differences that I see. One is the people involved. As the first open-source J2EE implementation, EJBoss caught the attention of all the people interested in the J2EE spec. Our biggest success is in attracting a good crowd of talented developers in the field.
Talent attracts talent.
There are also many little startups that need a real EJB container for their applications, so they contribute highly motivated and skilled people to the project. I've done everything to make them happy and excited about the project. Since my company benefits a lot from the work performed in EJBoss, I've felt it was fair to offer stock options to the most dedicated contributors. Most the people working on this stuff are pretty passionate. This presents a lot of advantages to our current spectrum of contributors.