Being an open source guy, it pains me to read most of what passes for informed opinion on open source from people who are far, far removed from any sort of real open source contribution. But, in the end, it's easy enough to ignore the random noise. It's a little harder to ignore someone like Ted Neward, who should have a bit more interesting things to say than he does here:
"My long-shot dream: JBoss goes out of business, the JBoss source code goes back to being maintained by developers whose principal interest is in maintaining open-source projects rather than making money, and it all gets folded together with what the Geronimo folks are doing. In other words, the open-source community stops the infighting and starts pulling oars in the same direction at the same time. For once.
"
Ok, obviously it's easy to take comments about JBoss personally. But, trying to get beyond that for a moment, let's see what this means. Obviously it bad for open source developers who have invested lots of time in a project to make a living working on it. They should all work day jobs, or try to make a living consulting or writing about their open source work. Whatever they do they, they must never, ever try and create a business model that let's them spend ALL their time working on the open source project they love. If you aren't doing it on the weekends, it just ain't real open source.
Not only should you not do that, you should never, ever try to create business around an open source project that provides development and production support for large companies that require that level of service. These companies should be hiring outside consultants maintaining the software on the weekend, to provide the level of service they need.
Another thing you should never do is create a scalable
business model that allows other open sourceprojects to jump in, letting their developers spend 100% of their time working on the open source projects they founded and love. I tell you, the world would be a better place if those guys were still weekend warriors doing it just for the fun of it.
Oh, and whatever you do, you must never, and I mean NEVER, should you be so successful in your open source business that you can take a critical missing link in open source enterprise Java and open source a previously closed source product that fills that void. Obviously, these people don't love open source. You should instead work on an entirely new open source solution on the weekends, because that's just the way it ought to work.
Obviously, what JBoss is doing is so terrible, that we can only hope the company making all this possible goes out of business. All those developers, who spend all of their time working on open source should go back to the job market and spend all their work days working on proprietary software and tossing the odd hours here and there back to the projects they love so much. Why don't those JBoss guys just get with the program and figure out what open source is really all about?
Ok, I know Ted well enough to know that he has more intelligent things to say about open source than that. And, I know he isn't dense enough to truly believe that we at JBoss aren't in it for the love of open source and for the love of our projects. Ted, if you've got a problem with JBoss, fine. If you don't like the company or some of the outspoken individuals here, fine. If you secretly hope that we'll all be trampled over by a herd of wild goats, great. Just say that, and don't hide behind some completely disingenuous "they're just in it for the money" argument.
Previous Topic
