Bill Dudney's Weblog: Oracle Buying JBoss? Who Cares?

No I don't have all the answers but I really hate JBoss.com as a model

Feb. 10, 2006 10:45 PM

Ok, I've been following the hype and speculation about Oracle buying JBoss but the latest bit that I read on Business Week really got my dander up. Its not the article from BW that was irritating at all it was the comment by some one claiming to be 'Siddharth Gulhati'. I don't know Sid but his comment is over the top for me.

Quoth Sid;

"Guys! Open source is definitely under threat, especially if the top open source players JBoss, Zend and Sleepycat are ready to sell off their passion and commitment for a chunk of money. I would like to ask them: Where is your passion and commitment to serve the community? Does it still exist, or has it been completely wiped off by a few dollars. I bet, post aquisition of these open source players by market leaders and commercializers like Oracle, the term open source itself will lose its meaning."

Come on Sid! JBoss sucks as open source. It is really just a propritary model (i.e. Oracle) on a public CVS tree. How many committers on any part of the JBoss stack have you heard of that are not JBoss employees? I susspect that # is approaching zero... And sheesh, give me a break Sid, why is it bad for someone to make some $ from their great work and passion. I mean come on, if you don't make money off something you are passionate about I pitty you! If the community was truly open (i.e. the community was really about the technology and not about gratifying egos) then the purchase of one company that provides support would be a good thing for the community as a whole.

There is a lot more to be said about this for sure, but I'm trying to finish a project before I start ranting on open source business models. No I don't have all the answers but I really hate JBoss.com as a model.

Published Feb. 10, 2006— Reads 16,962 — Feedback 3
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About Bill Dudney
Bill Dudney is Editor-in-Chief of Eclipse Developer's Journal and serves too as JDJ's Eclipse editor. He is a Practice Leader with Virtuas Solutions and has been doing Java development since late 1996 after he downloaded his first copy of the JDK. Prior to Virtuas, Bill worked for InLine Software on the UML bridge that tied UML Models in Rational Rose and later XMI to the InLine suite of tools. Prior to getting hooked on Java he built software on NeXTStep (precursor to Apple's OSX). He has roughly 15 years of distributed software development experience starting at NASA building software to manage the mass properties of the Space Shuttle.