I respectfully disagree with Jacob's view to the JBoss licensing issue. When I and even more true for Rickard started to contribute JBoss had a GPL license. Then Marc asked us if we agree to change it to LGPL but did not mention that he was going to register JBoss as a trademark. Therefore we were not aware of the issues that did arise now. The JBoss Inc. already used legal threads to stop competition with the Apache Geronimo project and so I think that is not a isolated incident.

I do no dispute the use of a trademark in a business but here an open-source project, a commercial entity and a trademark are combined in a such a way that the JBoss Inc. can profit from the open-source project without any competition. Matthias, from the JBoss Issue Blog, pointed out that Bea registered its name as trademark for the product and services but Weblogic is only a registered trademark for the product. This way I can advertise training for the Weblogic application server as long as I do not use the Bea trademark with it.

Even thought this issue that came up with JBoss it is a much bigger issue than that. It has implication on how open-source project conduct their business and that contributors have the right to know upfront on what their are getting into. This is also a question about ethics, control and protection of an open-source project. I always thought that the trademark of Linux and JBoss are there to protect the project from a sleazy opportunist that uses the trademark to exploit a successful open-source project. Now it seems that this one comes within its own ranks and that the idea of the protection was just a nice cover.

JBoss Inc. can make as much money of the project as they like and I am perfectly happy with that. On the other hand I know more about JBoss than most of the people with a JBoss certification or partnership with the JBoss Inc. so why shouldn't I be allowed to give training about JBoss?

Have fun - Andy