Slashdot Mirror
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?"
makes the case that "no one is going to work for free."
Hey, 1990 called. They want their open-source-failure theory back!
If he really has this attitude, he is sadly mistaken and most likely being a jerk.
A lot of my motivation for contributing is a way saying thanks.
How does he pay for all of his foundations? Or is he just a taker?
Since his stuff is Free (if it is) you can look at it as who cares?
One thing with people who only do it for the money is that I tend not to trust them not to make things unnecessarily complex in order to earn the service/consulting money.
In any case... Go Free Software.
all the best,
drew
FreeMusicPush If you want to see more Free Music made, listen to Free
There really is no such thing as a free lunch and where the rubber meets the road, it comes down to the bucks. However, it certainly makes him look like a knob to piss on very things that have helped him get to where he is now. Dude needs to chillax and smoke a bowl I say.
How many artists choose Art over Money?
Most of them. Some artists do actually starve for their art, although this is perhaps a romanticized minority. Nonetheless, the general principle holds true: people driven to create art have less time for day jobs -- or if they're confined to day jobs, their souls suffer for want of art.
Thus with some coders, who give it away: they are driven to create the art of open source.
-kgj
-kgj
Why are people so hate filled when it comes to the thought of people working in their spare time to help each other? Its called charity. I think this guy feels threatend. Why be so negative to a concept thats so positive?
I think that you're overestimating the value of support contracts and other open source based business plans. Sure, there's some money to be made there, but it's a latecomer to the open source party and only a tiny piece of the puzzle.
Open source works because all of us are smarter than one of us. Programmers naturally look for preexisting solutions to problems, because it enables them to get to the thing that they really want to do faster. And they'll naturally return the favor when they can. It's just politeness to contribute bug fixes.
This model has serious, serious flaws. There will always be more takers than givers. But the good news is that distribution is cheap, so one giver can support hundreds of freeloaders.
Other problems are harder. Many of the contributions take place against the background of a standard closed-source project, where the management doesn't mind participating in open source as long as the real product development remains proprietary. A utopian pure open-source environment will fail; the whole thing works as well as it does only because the economics of redistribution are so cheap.
There are many other issues which are not easy to work around, and that's what this guy is really getting at: open source can't promote the non-fun stuff, like good user interfaces and (for the most part) QA. Certain crucial pieces of infrastructure (Apache, Linux kernel) have so many people banging on them that they get QA'ed anyway, and they're so integral to other money-making schemes that it ends up being in some people's interests to do the work anyway. But away from those projects the software gets buggier and buggier, and you'd have to pay people to make them less buggy.
So in the end there's money to be made in the standard business model, which is actually what JBoss is using. The difference is that some of the software they develop "leaks" around the edges into open source, because that's their way of playing nice with other people doing the same thing. The more core something is, the more effective it is to share your work and to use the shares in return; the system supports the freeloaders.
The real money is in doing specific work for specific customers, of which "support contracts" are only a trivial part. "Support contracts" are really just another name for "closed-source, proprietary software" built on top of the open source. And that's just business as usual.
As programmers, we'll share because it's fun and we'll share because we're a community that likes to help each other out. That's at the end of the day; from 9 to 5 we'll continue to write software the way it's always been done, for the same economic reasons: you have to pay people to develop the boring stuff and the stuff that involves knowing the subject domain. The kernel and Apache mean you don't have to know about anything except computers. If you want to build a ticket reservation site or a pharmaceutical database, you actually have to know something outside of computers, and that always costs money.
Read the fucking article.
He's not calling all open source contributors "Hari Krishnas", he's calling the ones who heckle him at conferences "Hari Krishnas".
The best test of your belief in free speech is when someone says something you don't like.
The best test of free software is when someone does something with it that you don't like (e.g. making money).
This guy is following the license and spirit of the GPL, and making money doing it. People should be patting him on the back, not giving him a hard time.
You are kidding right? That or your pretty wrong.
Microsoft and AOL have been adopting something called SPF that was originally presented by one of these F/OSS Hippies.
IIRC TCP/IP was originally developed in F/OSS software because it was Open.
Who did transparent GUI design?
Who first developed a XML based solution for the general group of Office Products?
Who developed and presented the rssmail whitepaper? Hippies or Suits?
What was the first tool for real time chat? IRC or AIM? Who developed it?
Was the first implimentation of a Web Browser (Mosaic) open source or coompany derived?
You forgot to wrap your comments in sarcasm tags or you are an idiot.
He does understand that as well, read the actual interview not the butchered blurb, however they're all hobbyists to him. And he is right, they are hobbyists at least those who write the actual software. What is so hard to understand about that? As you yourself said, they're motivations are different and in essence more "fluid" than that of a paid developer. They may get bored when that annoying last 5% of the app has to get done (like fixing those annoying bugs, etc.), other things may come up, and so on.
However, as he says they seem to get pissed off quite often when they realize he is able to make money of it while they can't.
The interview is pretty vague, however it appears to me that he doesn't particularly like the model where you basically sell service or whatever while using hobbyist to make the actual code. As you yourself pointed out hobbyist have different motivations, which he would probably argue aren't the best for keeping such a business model alive. Even in Linux the main developers, asfaik, are basically paid to work on the Kernel.
you can't have a business model where you say, "Hey, guys, you write my software for me and then I'm going to make all the money off of it!"
...of course you can. Game publishers, book publishers, movie companies, tv stations, music labels and so on thrive on taking a "production" and delivering it to consumers. However, you do need to have some added value. Even though the applications are FLOSS there are many way to do that, I'm sure you can think of a few...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings