We met at the conference Middleware 2000 in New York and agreed that the world was missing an open source, fast and efficient CORBA-OTS (besides more peace). While the TAO-Team around Douglas Schmidt provides an enterprise-level, stable ORB with many services and features, a Transaction Service is missing. So we decided to fill this gap. The current maintainer and developers of the first release are Christoph Liebig and Andreas Kühne. The project can only succeed with your feedback, bug reports, fixes, suggestions. XOTS needs your contribution ! Thanks to Marco Malva, who contributed the initial research prototype on top of TIBCO middleware during his masters at Darmstadt University of Technology. Then Holger P. Krekel and A. Kuehne joined the reimplementation effort for TAO. Thanks Holger, for your many contributions !