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JBoss Founder Hard-Nosed About Open Source

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hand-that-feeds dept.

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?"

6 of 423 comments (clear)

  1. Rattling The Tiger Cage by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  2. Ridiculously mischaracterized article by daniel_mcl · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  3. I don't get it. by KriKit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  4. Not as bad as story summary makes it sound by Doug+Merritt · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.

    --
    Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
  5. RTFA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Again? by Lepaca+Kliffoth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "He's not completely wrong. Open source people will only work on what interests them so you have a ton of very crappy, partially-finished open source software out there that usually just barely scratches the itch of the original programmer. Sure there are successes like Mozilla Firefox, Apache, KDE, Gnome, the Linux kernel, etc., but for every success there are hundreds of completely useless failures out there."

    And why do you want to use the failures rather then the successes? I use kernel + Xorg + KDE + several applications like mplayer, amaroK, thunderbird and so on. They are all very polished, perform admirably and only the testing versions ever crash (and I use unstable things only in rare cases). If someone wants to code a pile of crap it's none of my concern, the great, well coded apps I can install are more than I'll ever use.

    "Most businesses would be insane to rely on open source programmers to develop their software for them... that's why many of you reading this still have a job developing commercial software or in-house homegrown software. They give you money, you develop software that they want. It's a win-win situation. The alternative is they give you nothing, you starve, someone spends all their free time writing another damn e-mail client or content management system in PHP"

    I don't see the problem here. Open Source programmers are still programmers and they're paid by whoever employs them. Novell and Red Hat aren't exactly what you would call community-driven, heh. The programmers giving code for free are usually guys sending in patches for some kind of problem they found and were able to fix. Anyway if someone wants to donate it's his decision, nobody points a gun at him. If someone starts a project, leaves it and it remains unfinished it will go in the pit together with all the crappy programs I'll never use.