Andreas Schaefer's Blog

Open-Source vs. Big Bucks

What a disappointment! After feeling betrayed by the JBoss Inc. with the trademark lawsuits now also Linus Torwald seems to do the same thing with Linux. Yesterday I was attending a presentation about Java 6 (Mustang) and some of the discussions turned around Sun and open-source. Finally, I guess, I have to admit that maybe Sun is more trustworthy company with respect to open-source than some of the bigger open-source projects. I really feel that Sun is paying more attention to the open-source community lately than projects that started as open-source projects and then became a business.

I am especially disgusted by the comments of Sacha Labourey stating that Rickard is not a co-founder of JBoss. Today there would be no JBoss if Rickard Oeberg did not revamp early version of Marc's monolithic application server. He was the one that came up with the use of JMX as an IOC framework, the use of Interceptors to easily wrap J2EE services around an EJB call and the use of Dynamic Proxies to avoid the generation and distribution of stubs. Without Rickard JBoss would have ended up the same way Jonas did. Of course Rickard is not a co-founder of the JBoss Group (today called JBoss Inc.) but they were created way after JBoss became a serious J2EE-based application server.

Maybe there is a need to separate the open-source code from any trademark to prevent individual from taking advantage of code contributed by the community. I do not contemn anyone from making money of an open-source project but it is not acceptable in my opinion that this only applies to a few. I always thought that the JBoss trademark is there to avoid a big company from screwing the open-source project but now it seems that it backfired for the community and the JBoss Inc. can just cash in.

Have fun - Andy

Comments

• Any idea what the JBoss Drools announcement means?

  Posted by: johnreynolds on October 12, 2005 at 05:29 AM

• Um. This is how trademarks work. Try selling some Java-related software with Java in its name and see how friendly Sun is. Not a big deal. (Although in cases like JavaScript vs. JScript vs. ECMAScript vs. ActionScript vs. JS, trademarks can help cause confusion.)

  Posted by: tjpalmer on October 12, 2005 at 08:12 AM

• Agreed - lay of Linus, he's doing what he has to do, and $200-$5000 is not a lot for a trademark.

  The JBoss matter, on the other hand, is quite different. JBoss, Inc.'s is showing that a huge lapse of integrity. They may be in their legal rights to sell "JBoss" training, but it's not ethical to stop others. JBoss has always been a different form of OS organization. The forums are chuck full of unanswered posts, for example. More grandstanding than humility in the face of so many intelligent peers. I like JBoss, but I suddenly going to start spending a lot more time looking into Geronimo (now 1.4 certified).

  Michael Bushe

  Posted by: michaelbushe on October 12, 2005 at 11:04 PM

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