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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?"
But he's definitely no politician. People want to believe that you can get something for nothing. He sounded a little on the abrasive side.
I found it interesting that he distinguishes between different types of software, implying that there would be vastly different business models for each -- "don't try this at home" I would have liked to have seen the interviewer nail him down on this a little more -- I think there is some good stuff there but without the details its hard to know whether he knows what he's talking about or not.
What's spaghetti got to do with hurricanes?
Marc Fleury obviously doesn't understand the philosophy of opensource. Did he bother to consider revenue from support contracts? Or that companies will pay you to work on opensource software? Also, opensource software saves companies money. Instead of building your application from scratch for your particular company, use an existing opensource application and (thanks to source) pay for only modification to meet your needs, and your changes may be useful for others. Or you can dual license, or sell hardware with opensource software included.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
What the guy is saying is that he sees a lot of companies sitting around trying to make money off of other people's work (i.e. all twelve thousand linux distributions), whereas he wants to pay people to develop open-source applications. He's just saying that 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!"
I used to read Caltizzle. I was a lot cooler than you.
Don't be put off by the somewhat tendentious write-up; the interview
itself is interesting, if brief. I think the case against "OSS" from a
purely business point of view is quite strong; but this doesn't worry
me, since I'm not in the business, and I prefer Free Software
anyway.
I'm not an open source/free software zealot, but Mr. Fleury seems to be ignoring an important point. Namely, that while individual developers are only going to give for free until they get tired of giving (this is true as it's a tautology), the "community" as a whole will continue giving. The power of OSS is in numbers. Once it reaches critical mass, it drives forward regardless of any single individual.
If OSS relied on any one developer, of course it would fail, and I think that is the mistake many detractors make in commenting about it. They fail to understand that OSS is greater than the sum of its parts.
Has it, really? How many non-trivial, successful open source software projects aren't written mostly by staff paid to do the job? Pretty much all of the biggest names have some sort of commercial entity behind them, and those commercial entities expect to make money from the OSS-based work they do, by some means or other. The specific economic model may be non-traditional, but the underling economic principles certainly aren't!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
If the OSS movement is ever to survive and become something more than a hippy hobbyist kludge then it needs hardnosed realists who can produce results, not just fire and brimstone ministers such as Richard Stallman.
Making money is not dirty, a profitable free software company is not a sell out, and yes professionalism in open source is something that should be encouraged.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
"Since his stuff is Free (if it is) you can look at it as who cares?"
Funny you should mention that, while he is a two faced sleazeball, at least according to several friends who know him and some who used to work for him, he does indeed keep his work truly open. That is the beginning though, not the end. It was also built on the backs of free authors, at least one of which was a good friend.
Now, the trick they use is to purposely not document their work, it is free indeed, but just try to use it. Oh, you want support? Write a check to.....
Now, you have to remember this is the same guy who called Jonathan Schwartz "a ponytailed clown from McKinley". Now, good old JS does sport a ponytail, but the last time I saw him, the clown makeup was notably absent. Not sure about the McKinley bit though.
All this is second hand, but it comes from people who were starry-eyed groupies until they realized the intracicies of his 'management' style and told him where to cram his philosophy.
-Charlie
P.S. If you want stories about him, ask at TheServerSide.com, especially about posting under multiple pseudonyms to back up a failing arguement.
P.P.S In case you don't notice, I don't think highly of him, but I am one of the smiling happy people compared to those who know him.
Great post. The only thing I would add is that it is still possible to keep "proprietary" projects open source. For example, look at a closed source application like ADP (or PeopleSoft, etc). Their software sucks.. badly. But they make most of their money on two things: salary processing and consulting. You can't just drop ERP packages into a company and go. You need a number of consultants to set it up, maintain it, and extend it.
That said, consulting is not a panacea. To increase revenue, you need to hire more people. In the software industry, the margins are an order of magnitude better because once the software is developed, you can simply print more copies.
Well, frankly if I paid someone to develop an application and I felt it was good enough, I'd sell it, not just give it away for free. Why should I spend my hard-earned money paying someone to write a piece of software only to let them give it away to anyone else, including my competitors!?
It was released public-domain and it was developed in a research center. So you're still right, but I'm just being a nitpicker.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Okay, ignore the business aspect for a second, look at it from my (a developer's) point of view.
Before I got involved in OSS, I was yearning to get into consulting, but I couldn't seem to find a breakthrough job to establish a reputation. People just didn't want to believe I could do the work. I'm in the magical "recently graduated college" zone where I'm not expereinced enough to be senior but not young enough to be an undergrad consultant.
After I got involved and contributed to an open source project as one of the primary developers, suddenly I had exposure. Sure, I didn't get paid for the work (and we did a lot of work in just 2 months). But that investment has helped me to get a very good consulting job, and I've gotten a lot more exposure because people talk to me about the library and what it does.
It's the best thing to happen to my career since graduating college.
No one will work for free, but who said that we're working for free? I consider my OSS work to be an investment in my repuation and my future career. It certainly has paid off in a very short amount of time.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
Almost every successful asshole does this. They ignore how fortunate they were (just out-and-out LUCKY) and attribute all their success to themselves. So you get stories of how they walked uphill, both ways, etc. Everyone else who hasn't pulled himself up by his bootstraps is a loser or "Hari Krishna" or whatever.
Edison did the same thing, bragging about how hard he worked and perspired, somehow missing the fact that he rode to success on the backs of many others. But don't be too hard on these guys. CEOs have to do this because they're constantly marketing themselves as well as their company and product(s).
Yes, their recent 46% increase in revenue sure leads me to believe you. Or the other major increases in revenue before that.
/sarcasm
Or the fact that they increased subsciptions by 400% right after CentOS became well known also leads me to believe you.
Yep, you're definately right. All Fortune 1000 companies download unsupported software off of the internet to power their $5 million mainframes or their 32 way servers.
In-fact, Sun saw Red Hat going bankrupt and loved the idea so much that this is the exact reason they have open sourced Solaris, they aspire to go Bankrupt too!!! Of course it had nothing to do with Red Hat rapidly increasing its market share while cutting heavily into Sun's, since, according to you, Red Hat is losing market share and going bankrupt.
I wonder about that "walk-out" though. These "Core Developers" are all part of the JBoss Community still, right?
Also, there hasn't been any news from the Core Developers since 2003, when they walked out.
Meanwhile, Marc Fleury and JBoss appears to be doing well.
ERP is a fascinating case study. It's hard for so many reasons, the biggest of which is the fact that people insist on customizing it to within an inch of its life (and usually miles past it). If people were to start standardizing their business practices so that they could use the software more out-of-the-box, they'd spend a lot less money and have far more reliability.
Arguably PeopleSoft isn't closed source enough. Go to business school, adopt some standards, and quit messing with the software. If you think your company is so different from every other company on the planet that you need to run it in a completely novel way, either your a genius or an idiot. I know which side I'm betting on.
I'm exaggerating for comic effect; I've worked with ERP systems and many businesses and I know that there are too many variables to make a turnkey solution for any company with more than, say 500 employees. But I still think that the management of most of them needs to spend less time customizing and more time reusing standards. They're like programmers who insist on rolling their own libraries for every project they do.
And not that PeopleSoft hasn't made a complete botch of it anyway, though I suspect it would be more solid if they didn't have to expose every hook inside of it so that people could customize it (making it nearly impossible to do any housecleaning without breaking everybody's customized solution.)
And yhea its the Inquirer but still worth a read
/. by people who I suspect 95% of, have never contributed a single line of code. Real contributers always seem the ones that have a balanced often even pragmatic approach.
As if you had to appologize for that after the 'journalistic integrity' of the story summary.
There's been way too many of these taken out of context, wildly sensational story summaries that would make the inquirer blush.
I'm glad there is a comment system, it's required reading to put things in perspective.
What's also interesting to see is this vicious defence of anything Open Source here on
(please, no 'you must be new here' jokes)
The build tool that JBoss use was built by us hobbiests. I hope a product built by "amateurs" with no support other than the user mail list and the defect tracking site is not so low quality that it isnt up to the 'commercial' needs of teams like JBoss. If it aint, well, they are free to fork it and do their own implementation ---let's see how far they get.
I am really pissed off with the "amateur" quote. Ant was built by its end users, but they were software developers, each solving their own little problem. As most software dev problems are common, the tool shares out. but amateur? Software professional in their spare time is more accurate.
If there is one thing that OSS has shown, it is that
1. full time software teams do not produce better quality products than the amateurs (example: Linux v. windows)
2. end user involvement produces products that meet user needs far better than a marketing department telling engineers in cubicles what to do.
Imagine if Ant was a private company. We'd have to have meetings with the VCs. We'd have a marketing department. We'd have to deliver things on deadlines, whether they were ready or not. And we' d have to convince the world we were better than a planet full of software developers collaborating to solve their own problems, and sharing the results. This is what jboss are like: they have to slag off the rest of the OSS community, to justify their very existence.
-Steve
I think that essentially all commercial software projects fail at some point. Whether they make enough money to pay for the development in the mean time is another matter.
I would say that probably 90% or more commercial software projects fail in that they never become self-sustaining. And I am willing to bet that even many of the fairly large software houses have substantial failure rates for their own projects. How many projects that Microsoft works on never make it to the store shelf? How about with Adobe?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I've actually had to deal with the JBoss guys on several occasions (I brought them in to compete for a few bids at my company), and I can't stand them. They are the least responsive vendor I have ever seen, and that's saying something. They're more arrogant and confrontational than Reuters or Bloomberg, and that's an almost miraculous achievement.
I am glad that they have succeeded, as if JBoss does for app servers what Linux did for Operating Systems, that will be a good thing. Unfortunately, I see a rocky future for them, probably. It seems that if you want to use the service business model, telling your customers to screw off at every opportunity is not a good plan, and it will hurt you eventually.
I also think their focus is slightly misplaced, but that's a minor technical issue. Presumably it will be fixed as JBoss becomes more mature. With a little time, hopefully by JBoss 5.0, they'll have a much more impressive AS, with fewer weakpoints. Perhaps then they can really strive to fix the few weaknesses they have.
Not exactly, Ant was originally the build tool inside of Tomcat. Tomcat was originally written at Sun Microsystems. Later, the two were seperated. While there are "hobbiests" I'd suggest the greatest majority of Ant contributors are part time folks who contribute because nearly every Java project on the planet uses Ant and they fix what they need to fix or add what they need to add. The most noted contributors write books and give talks on ant and receive *some* form of compensation. Having lived on both the Apache and "professional" side of open source, I can tell you I never did it "for free". I did it for career enhancement, some consulting money, to make my life easier. Sure I had non-monetary motives some of the time (its just way more enjoyable to work in open source), but the monetary motivations were always there. While I don't personally think the SingleCo/codebase model is the ONLY model, its certainly a model of open source.
You are quite right. In-use means success.
This guys seems to think success of open source is when hobbyists work for free, and failure is when companies work for free [by paying their staff to do open source instead of something else].
When a company works for free, surely that is the bigger success, a company decides more on the balance sheet than hobbyists who decide based on hobby.
If open source profits companies, then it is success by his own terms!
This guy wants the companies that work on open source for free, to out-source it to his company instead.
But isn't the whole success of open source where companies work for free precisely because it suits them better than the traditional alternative?
He's nuts.
Sam
[Company works for free is means the company wasn't paid to do it, just like hobbyists work for free means the hobbyist wasn't paid to do it. The fact that the company pays the workers is as relevant as the hobbyist eating to feed his body]
blog.sam.liddicott.com
Listen.
I'm about as borzhwa as they come.
I spend about 3-6 hours per week working on my yard.
My motivation?
I want my house and my yard to look nice.
Who benefits?
My neighbors who try to sell their houses, it increases neighborhood property values. Do *I* get any kickbacks? Are you shitting me? People do things for reasons other than personal profit all the fucking time.
I benefit, with pride, and personal satisfaction.
I see no difference between my decadent motivations, and the Open Source movement.
This guy's just a "Free Market" capitalist ideologist. Ideology seldom has anything to do with the real world.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
What really irks me is the use of the word "amateur". WTF does he mean by that? The word implies "not an expert". But he applied to an important developer. So does he mean "someone who does something because he enjoys it", ie a hobbyist? Oh well, he just throws in some hari krishna BS to cover it. "Amateur" is a poor word to use, at least the way he used it. The arcticle reads like a troll aimed at CIOs... "Yeah, I started in mommys basement, but I figured out how to make a profit, and then, like, I was flying my rich ass around in Europe and I was tired, but I came to the conference anyway, and you're just dirty hippies. Yeah, bitches." He might have a successful company, but his attitude sucks.