First and foremost I am commited to JBoss as a fully featured and fully free open source platform. That is the root of our success. The lgpl and distributed ownership of the code prevent anyone from going to a proprietary format. period.
As for linux and apache, neither one is a commercial success and a model I want to emulate. Linux is not making money, not for its packagers, not for its developers, the packagers lack credibility as 3rd parties. Apache is chiefly funded (at least the java part) by SUN and IBM, the truth is that the developers are all employees. I don't want that, I want a model where *we the developers* (as in we the people) profit from our work. Think america, we are on a new ground, far away from corporate monarchy and represion, we are building a new model, we all believe in it, we all worked hard, and are working, we are seeing the first massive fruits. Are we a democracy? No, we are a meritocracy. Every month or so we see people that 'discover us' and want to get something for free, of course an organized body of developers with a commercial dimension spells trouble for the 'leech' that would like to exploit the code produced and face no competition from the body of developers that put it forth in the first place. My goal is to build a service company where many of you can offer your talents. Many of you are already doing work in this capacity, it is bound to explode in the coming weeks. Since we are getting more mainstream coverage now in the press and analysts are going around saying JBoss is 'brutal' competition to BEA/IBM expect to see more leeches. That is my job, to fend off leeches, commercial entities smelling the group of idealistic developers they think they can easily exploit. For the record in our partnership programs we do not and will not do business with anyone marketing themselves as an application server, we see 'let us be the corporate mask for jboss' almost every week, they think our tails will start wagging once they mention 'fortune 500' and they throw us a bone of a few $s. Even one of the proprietary j2ee vendor tried that thinking we would be thrilled to get 10k. Talk about open source being idealistic. I repeat my ideal is to not go back to cubicle land, where developers are treated like slaves, paid shit and taken out to stroll every once in a while by the sales people. I am in a new world, other developers are settling here with me, I make sure they can, I try to get them started I try to give them the tools for them to earn a living by themselves, I don't pay, I don't give them lunch, I teach them to 'hunt and fish' and will provide them a forum to sell their services. We will continue growing and growing fast, i will continue watching the horizon, leeches will come and leeches will go, we will remain and grow. marcf ps: telkel was my previous company trying to do a 'loudcloud' around jboss, we failed to secure funding, we lost our own money (i lost a personal 70k) i learned a lot about the vc world, i know now that we can grow without it, WE will find the open source business model, it is somewhere in between wild eyed idealism and cold corporate capitalism, it has a human dimension, a love for the technology, respect for its citizens as defined by contributions, and an immense hope for our collective future. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Marc Fleury President JBoss Group, LLC xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx _______________________________________________ Jboss-development mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jboss-development
