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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?"
makes the case that "no one is going to work for free."
Hey, 1990 called. They want their open-source-failure theory back!
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?
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
Man that is fun.
Some nitpicks:
1) I prefer 'dirty' in front of the word 'hippie'
2) I can't believe he didn't work 'bearded GNU freak' into to the interview
I have to admire someone else who goes straight to the big ammo, high impact terminology. A kindred spirit.
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.
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.
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.
Seeing as he makes OSS whih generates decent revenue for him and pays for its own development, so I would assume he knows all that much better than you.
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?
but isn't it in some sense built on the shoulders of the hippies and hobbyists he seems to scorn
Not really. Java has continued to be a thorn in the side of the GNU camp because of it's licensing issues. His product has been built from the ground up and serves as a platform for the deployment of non-free software. Thus, he does not stand on the shoulders of those he scorns.
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/04/22 12228&tid=108
And yhea its the Inquirer but still worth a read:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9504
JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL Editor-in-chief Alan Williamson has recently awarded Marc Fleury with the title "JBoss's own worst enemy" in his blog (http://alan.blog-city.com/readblog.cfm?BID=77874) . It appears that there were some polling inconsistencies with the JDJ awards and that the JBoss Group's CEO gave Williamson quite the verbal lashing in a letter earlier this week. Williamson reacted by publishing Fleury's email in his blog.
He's not making a blanket statement about open source developers being Hari Krishnas, he's talking about hecklers in his audience.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
1) Astroturf wildly to market your product, on the assumption that your customers and fellow developers are idiots
2) Issue a mealymouthed pseudo-apology, when you get caught
3) Wait a year, then publicly call your fellow OSS developers "hippies" and "Hari Krishnas"
4) ??
5) Profit!!!
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.
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.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Who said we are working for free when what we are really doing is bartering.
I work on a video editor, or the docs for openoffice, or beta testing for Blender.
In return you do something similar.
In return, I get a $500 package (openoffice) free without needing to pay taxes.
In return, I get access to code that does 90% of what I want so I only have to write the 10% instead of 100%.
OSS moves ahead because it doesn't have to care about -cash- payments. It can take almost as long as it wants on any project and when it gets "good enough" then it starts eating into the commercial software it compets with.
I passed a key marker in the last 3 months - I no longer install Office on all my boxes. THat followed another key point 6 months ago when I said the default programs were Writer and Calc instead of Word and Excel.
Now I'm seriously looking at Umbuntu and it's very likely I'll be using it 100% on one box.
Anyway- back to my basic point- even businesses can benefit enormously from open source. They get access to code 90% written, write the 10% they need and contribute it back to the stream. This allows them to make deadlines they otherwise could not and to get software that works (bypassing a huge amount of risk) that they only have to tweak.
And some of them are STILL greedy and try to take the free code and hide their changes (fortunately they are getting busted lately).
It's not that hard folks- get thousands of dollars worth of free software- make your business profitable and give just a little bit back.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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).
Sorry, never heard of Marc Fleury nor JBoss. Is JBoss a clothing line or something?
Anyway, I suppose I could look him up, but if he's making these statements as if people should listen to him, shouldn't he kind of be a known person? I can make statements all day long too...but since I'm a nobody like this guy why should anyone listen to me? Why is anyone even reading this post?
Don't mod me as anything.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Hey, 1990 called. They want their open-source-failure theory back!
The "hippies" writing OSS were not as charitable as you suggest. Many were getting paid or compensated, just not by their software customers. A cushy academic job where you get to choose you own area of research and/or projects, a student working school project, etc.
I'm not saying people did not give away code they wrote on their own time, I did, so did others, it just wasn't called OSS in the 80s and early 90s. However a lot of open source software was and is subsidized one way or another.
makes the case that "no one is going to work for free."
For those of you who aren't familiar with Marc Fleury, he is the stereotype of the maveric, much like many of us. He's used to being the smartest guy in the room, he's used to being right whenever someone disagrees with him, and he doesn't soft peddle the fact that he thinks he's always right. There's an upside and a downside; people don't follow the wishy washy, but maverics tend to come off as assholes.
All that to say, this is just vintage Marc. His view is the only credible view in his world. It has cost him some important allies (eg: his entire core development team last year), and has won him others (eg: lots of venture capital). It will continue to be his hallmark.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
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'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
The professional programmer working on a project on the side "for free" is still a professional programmer, not an amateur. That said, there is nothing wrong with "amateur". There's also nothing about Open Source that says it should, or is likely to be, primarily produced by unpaid volunteers. It can be a purely self-interested economic decision by a company to use and produce Open Source software.
Bottom line is writing code takes time and money. There is no free lunch.
... no more profit in this sector for software. So, basically the government is paying for it .. I mean you and me if your talking about donations.
.. well .. your money.
... ya people took it hook, line and sinker.
The corporations will give a donation and get a tax deduction from it. Sort of like giving to charity. The corporation gets the code and the tax deduction. The only problem is that software market gets screwed in the process. Thus, it turns into a tool for the 'service' industry
Or how about your college prof involved in an open source project. Now the government is subsidizing the work directly.
Well, if your working yourself on your spare time its
Meanwhile, all the 'service' jobs get outsourced. Welcome to the new world, congratulations.
As a business model, in a vacuum, open source does not really add up. It only really works if its subsidized by a service industry/government. Sad part is its the programmers who get screwed out of their money for their labor and then have their governments taxes raided with deductions from the charitable giving. Meanwhile, promote a propaganda campaign to make working for free look cool
Different cases, sure, but the same short-sightedness and same origins - the "I'm better than you, 'cos I'm richer".
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...at hobbyist, hippie projects like Geronimo, that dare to offer "competition" to his product, even to the point of passing all the relevant certifications?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
"then I'm going to make all the money off of it!"
Game publishers, book publishers, movie companies, tv stations, music labels and so on usually have to pay someone for what they use.
He gets a few million in VC money and he thinks he's Bill Gates.
Nothing he said hasn't been refuted before.
Nothing to see here but another prima donna. Oh, wait, maybe he CAN compare himself to Bill Gates on that basis.
Move along.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Blah, blah, blah.
Just another soulless, scorched earth capitalist. "I relied on other people to make my money, but now, due to the frailty of my own nature, I'm now going to promptly forget what made me a millionaire in the first place, and get down to the usual millionaire activity of destroying the lives of as many people as I possibly can."
And before I get yet another barrage of comments from American reactionaries labelling me a Communist, let me say that I have nothing whatsoever against capitalism, provided that the capitalist in question remembers that they do not exist in a vacuum...that they're part of the larger human race...also that they actually need other people to get their money in the first place. It is capitalism with total disregard for others that I have major problems with. Mind you, the latter is the form that most Americans are familiar with anyway, so I stand corrected...a lot of you probably won't be able to tell the difference.
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.
It's ironic that he calls the idea of people working for nothing a myth but uses a myth to prove it:
"At top of the pyramid, you have these top 2% of developers that are 10 times -- in some cases 100 times -- more productive than the rest."
This is a very popular myth with rathy shaky evidence. Even the most modestly talented develper can write one line of code in 15 seconds. Who do you know that can write 100 lines of code in 15 seconds? Of course any meaningful measure of productivity would go beyond LOC, but that just weakens the case further since there are no established standards for comprehensive software productivity. We can't define productivity in any meaningful way, but we make broad claims about it anyway.
My joke is that 98% of developers believe that they are in the top 2%.