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by Norman Richards.
Original Post: Coming out of the open source closet
Feed Title: Orb [norman richards]
Feed URL: http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/java?flav=rss
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Apparently JBoss is not Open Source. While I understand the frustration of the author when dealing with companies that suddenly open source commercial products under barely free licenses for no other reason than to try to get free developers. But, I don't understand why he would single out JBoss, especially since he spends all his time talking about Redhat, MySQL and others.
Let's look at some facts. JBoss is LGPL. That's just about as free as you can get. The LGPL insures that JBoss will always be free. There's no way that anyone except the copyright holder can create a non-FREE version of JBoss. And, guess what - JBoss Inc doesn't hold the copyright for JBoss. The individual contributers do. That's wouldn't be true if JBoss were under a BSD-style license. I'm not trying to bash any projects that do use BSD licenses, but if you want to make sure that a free project stays free and that commercial interests of the people contributing never change then (L)GPL is by far the best place to be.
So, doesn't having a commercial backing make JBoss less pure somehow? I suppose that if you think it's a bad thing for open source developers to be able to make a living from developing open source software, then yes. Bad developers! You guys should be working on commercial projects during the day and slaving away on the open source work in your spare time. Ok, maybe it's ok if you do a little consulting, but that's it. Do you here me! You must not get paid for writing open source. That's not argument the author was making, but think about it -- wouldn't it be nice if you could do open source full time? I wake up every morning grateful that I have that opportunity.
The commercial nature of the company isn't irrelevant, so let's think for a moment how JBoss makes its money. JBoss doesn't sell licenses. JBoss sells support and training to companies that need it to feel comfortable deploying a true open source application server. Imagine that you wanted to develop an application for your company and you recommended an open source tool like JBoss, but your company refuses to consider anything that they can't get 24x7 support or contractual guarantees for bug fixes? You'd have to go back to one of the commercial appserver companies. That's where a company like JBoss Inc comes in. JBoss, the company, can step in and fulfill those needs allowing big companies to feel comfortable about deploying JBoss. This is great for everyone. The company gets the guarantees it needs. The JBoss developers get a paycheck. And, all the other JBoss users get the improved quality and reliability that comes from all the additional development that occurs to fulfill the needs of the paying customer.
With the JBoss business model, everyone involved wins. Free software, pay service; it's professional open source. But I don't mean this to be JBoss marketing. I just want to say that I think JBoss is the epitome of good open source. Regardless of what you think of the code or the company, this is good old fashioned open source it's finest. I only hope that JBoss paves the way for more open source developers to come out of the closet, to stop doing weekend open source hacks and to be able to make a living working on the open source projects they love.
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