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by Norman Richards.
Original Post: What Drools joining JBoss means for open source
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definitely fills missing spot in the JEMS stack. That is interesting in and of itself, but what I find most interesting is what this means for open source.
First, take a look at what Mark Proctor, the Drools project lead, had to say about joining JBoss. It is an interesting read, especially if you've been been listing to people who insist on painting JBoss as some sort of evil anti-open source entity. The best part is the very last paragraph:
It would take 24+ months for a small company without an existing track record or infrastructure to try and build a strong brand around Drools, with all the support/consultancy/training/partner infrastructure that is needed for enterprise systems - this is a huge risk and one that I and Iterion were very much aware of. With JBoss we can achieve these in 6 months to a far greater effect, with negligible risk; as JBoss depends heavily on partners this will result in a larger ROI, due to scaling, with far less risk for them.
Think about this for a minute. Let's say you start in interesting open source project. Your project meets people's needs and starts catching on. You love your project, and you love open source. You'd really like to be able to work on it full time and maybe even make a decent living doing it. What do you do?
You could start your own company. You could offer consulting and training services or maybe even support. It's risky, but you think you could probably make it, slowly. It could take several years to really get off the ground.
Now, think about what JBoss has to offer. JBoss has created not only a great open source business model but also a thriving, profitable business around it. JBoss offers your project the chance to plug into that business model and take your open source project to users today. You don't have to spend all your time focussed on managing a business, you can focus on your project and how to better serve the needs of your users. What do you do? Joining JBoss makes a lot of sense.
If you are wondering what JBoss is about, I think Drools summarizes it nicely. It's about making professional open source a reality. When Hibernate joined up, it was easy to dismiss it as a one-time thing. Hibernate was one of the rare breakout open source projects before they signed on, though I'm not sure whether or not any of the Hibernate crew were actually making living from it before they joined. When jBPM joined, it was pretty clear that there was some interesting potential there. But, with Drools, it's pretty clear that a pattern is emerging.
It's too early to call it an absolute success, but it's pretty tough to ignore the positive effect JBoss is having on these other open source projects. When open source developers are able to make a living from their projects, that benefits them, their project and their users.
Lots of people talk open source, but JBoss does open source. I'm very happy that I get to be a part of that.
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