Fleury Nonsense
JBoss CEO Marc Fleury sometimes says some crazy things.
I read the following quote via a link in The Silent Penguin:
That’s the problem with the licensing and the fact that there is no company. Apache, it’s a Web site. It’s a nonprofit organization. You’re not doing deals with someone; you’re doing deals with a Web site, to some degree. There is the Apache Software Foundation as a nonprofit, and I’m really cool with that. That’s a success. But is it the right structure for something as critical for infrastructure?
Right. Well, there are plenty of big companies who think that the ASF is a perfectly good structure for infrastructure ‘deals’. Oracle 9iAS bundles apache’s HTTPD, so does IBM.
Leaving aside JBoss Group’s history of bad behaviour towards contributors , having Marc criticising one of the biggest and most widely respected open source organisations in the world makes the company look nuts.
JBoss is a great product, and the company does some good things. However, seeing how scared Marc has become about the impending release of geronimo makes me think there must be something to it. Someone needs to reign him in a little.
laurent mihalkovic May 6th, 2004 @ 05:00 PM
Not to mention for memory that the mother of all Open Source entity, the Free Software Foundation itself, is also a non-profit organization.
The argument of ‘dealing with a web site’ or the ‘right structure for something as critical for infrastructure’ is nonsensical, borderline idiotic. One of the workhorse of the computing industry at large, GCC, IS the product of the FSF and I don’t think that anyone has ever wondered if the FSF was righ for how critical the tool was. On the same token, what about the X Consortium, or the XFree one…
I hope their business philosophy is sounder than these arguments appear to be.
Matt May 6th, 2004 @ 06:38 PM
Please people ignore Fleury this guy is stupid and his only goal is to make money in any way possible.
Koz May 6th, 2004 @ 07:57 PM
JBoss is absolutely the best option for an open source J2EE server today. There is no question of that.
However, there is also no question that open source, non-profit foundations can produce ‘infrastructure’ software. Apache’s HTTPd, Samba, X11, GCC. There are plenty of examples. I’d venture a guess that many more organisations rely on the ASF for their critical infrastructure than will ever rely on JBoss.
The thing is, no-one doubts that JBoss is a great product and that the company is successful. Why does Marc feel the need to make such nonsense statements?
Ryan Ackley June 1st, 2004 @ 09:13 AM
His point was that its nice to have a company supporting the product (i.e. Red Hat supports Linux, IBM supports Apache web server). I try to look at JBoss as a company that is giving its product and source code away free instead of a company that is trying to exploit an open source project. Btw, that happens more often with BSD-style licenses like Apache because a company has no obligation to give anything back to the open source community. Trust me I know, I’ve seen it done.