JBoss Founder Hard-Nosed About Open Source

Infonaut writes "In this Business Week interview, JBoss founder Marc Fleury refers to "hobbyist" Open Source contributors and makes the case that "no one is going to work for free." Fleury dismisses people who contribute for something other than money as "Hari Krishnas" and makes reference to the "hippie dream". Fleury's sharp, profit-focused approach has brought him success, but isn't it in some sense built on the shoulders of the hippies and hobbyists he seems to scorn?"

Comments

Not as bad as story summary makes it sound

[Doug Merritt]

The story summary pissed me off, but the actual article is nowhere near so bad. A key quote:

This guy in the front row says "You've got to stop banging on people whose motivation is something other than money." There's always a Hari Krishna in the audience: "It's illegal to make money at this. We're all garage bands, and you sold your soul to the devil for a handful of dollars." So I go, "Have you contributed anything?" and usually they say no and I stop it there.

Turns out the guy is the founder of a pretty significant chunk of Linux, so Point A goes out the door. So I say, "You are what I call amateur open-source or hobbyist open source, which is you have a job and then you do this because that's your passion." And then somebody in the audience yells "You mean amateur open source as opposed to asshole open source?"

So there's always that. It's normal. There are always a bunch of amateurs because they've never made money at it, and it kind of pisses them off that there was a way to do it.

He's not making a blanket statement about open source developers being Hari Krishnas, he's talking about hecklers in his audience.

Only one draw-back to your post

[lheal]

I'm not going to complain about your spelling, since you might not be a native English speaker.

On the other hand, you're just wrong.

>They do not innovate w/ new tech-ideas.

Yes, they do. For instance, did you know that the first web browser to do page layout decently (in an "innovative" fashion: you put the pictures in line with the text!) was called NCSA Mosaic. It was distributed with source code. A company called Spyglass bought the rights to it. Microsoft used Mosaic as the basis for IE. For reference, in your browser window, click "Help -> About IE".

The web site you're on now is being served by an open source product called Apache, which was based on the NCSA http server. Apache has many innovative features, not the least of which is its open architecture (making it possible for Apache to run programs written in several different programming languages).

The page layout of this site is done by a program called Slashcode, an open source program. Comment moderation, and meta-moderation, are two technical innovations that came from this open source package.

It's written in PERL, through the Apache mod_perl plugin. PERL was a truly paradigm-shattering open source programming language. PERL was designed for handling strings and administering computer systems. When the web exploded, PERL turned out to be almost perfectly suited to it. Even without the web, PERL is great for doing sysadmin work.

The list would go on, and on, and I am not doing it justice by listing only a few.

The point is that all of the really innovative stuff comes from open collaboration. Closed source people are forced to look at what the market wants, and with one finger in the air can't be truly innovative.