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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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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