On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Ole Husgaard wrote:
> I have a few, but let me give you one of the possible scenarios
> I fear most:
Fear? This is the situation I *hope for* most! If jBoss is so
popular that commercial J2EE vendors start integrating it instead of
writing their own, then *we have won*! I don't think anyone at Apache was
complaining when some commercial knock-offs sprung up, offering extra
security, commercial support, etc. And surprise, surprise, all the time
those commercial companies dump into QA cycles, documentation, fancy
packaging, etc. is time they're not spending on developing new features,
so they just grab the new "latest Apache" for their next release. (Or so
I hypothesize, since I haven't actually used any of those commercial
releases - does that tell you anything?).
Now, for many of the people the "dark forces" serve, they are
offering a valuable service. Those clients value stability and support
over cutting-edge features. These are the clients that will never use a
product from a CVS tree. These are, in fact, clients that would never
even consider using jBoss otherwise, because there's no "guaranteed
support response time", no QA process, etc. So the "dark forces" are in
fact *expanding the market for jBoss*!
Now, let's consider companies such as X03 and Olliance, who are
providing commercial *open-source* server products, based on projects like
jBoss. I say "products like jBoss" and not "jBoss", because of the
GPL. With all the controversy demonstrated recently, it doesn't even
matter who's right or wrong. I just witnessed the greatest single flock
of backpedaling I have ever seen. It went something like this: "Oh my
*God*! If all the *developers* are fighting this much, there's *no way*
this license can be safe for our clients!!!"
So instead of commercial open-source J2EE server products using
jBoss, you're going to see commercial open-source J2EE server products
*competing with* jBoss. Dumping all their developer time into other
products.
Sure, it's easy to say "let them go," but really, our goal here is
to put together the best EJB server, not a room full of candidates.
Aaron
> In the (I hope) no so far future jBoss has taken over the world,
> and people are happy. But someone is _not_ happy: The Dark Force.
> They used to feed on people that really had no choice, but now
> people can get a better product for free. At the Dark Force
> something must be done: They are fat, but without food they might
> cease to exist.
> What do they do? They take our baby jBoss, clones it, change the
> clone a bit and has now created Darkened jBoss!
> Because they are still fat they can now start a big marketing
> campaign telling people that Darkened jBoss is the only right way
> to go and that they have discovered a lot of bad bugs in plain
> jBoss that may may cause dizzyness if they use anything but
> Darkened jBoss. Now the Dark Force can start feeding as the
> people are afraid of getting dizzy.
> What can we do about it? We ask the Dark Force: "Which bugs are
> you talking about?", but the Dark Force doesn't want to tell us.
> We try to educate people, but the marketing budget of the Dark
> Force keeps getting bigger as more scared people go with the Dark
> Force. We try to find out how Darkened jBoss was changed, but the
> Dark Force does not release sources.
>
> We can do nothing until we find the right weapon: Copyright law!
> But this weapon can really only be used if we have the right
> license. And we need the right license _before_ the Dark Force
> starts playing their tricks. The restrictions in our license is
> what makes our weapon so powerful.
>
> If the license requires that the sources for modifications must
> be made available, we can use our weapon to find out how they
> created Darkened jBoss. My guess is they didn't fix any bugs,
> but added some hooks to get those poor people hooked.
> GPL requires this, but the BSD license doesn't.
>
> If the license requires that modifications must be made available
> under the original license, The Dark Force cannot use Darkened
> jBoss to feed on people. Scared people could still go with
> Darkened jBoss, but they would take it for free and the Dark
> Force will starve and eventually cease to exist.
> GPL requires this, but the BSD license doesn't.
>
> Couldn't help putting it this way. Hope you get my point.
>
> I'm not familiar with the APL, but I think it is similar to
> the BSD license on these two points.
>
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Ole Husgaard.
>
