Jacob Hookom's Blog

Open Source Contributions

I'm getting tired of all of the finger pointing, everyone defining their own interpretations of what is open source and who owns it. I've had the opportunity to contribute code both to Sun and JBoss, knowing very well what I was doing: contributing. If I wanted to make money off of it, I would have kept it to myself and spent my own money marketing and supporting it.

Open Source vs. Trademarking are two separate issues here. Sun, JBoss, Linux, etc have all made a point to protect their trademark. Is it right for me to constitute use of their trademarks because I donated my ideas/code months ago? Do I suddenly have the right to offer trademarked services supporting JBoss or Sun? I do have the right to share/use the code I contributed though, knowing the licensing terms that I contributed the code under.

While I'm not capable of commenting on Rickard's specific case, or his actual relationship-- it is a specific case. Not something that applies to JBoss and everyone else in the world.

Comments

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.