The Story Behind JBoss's Boss

kosamae writes "Businessweek has an interesting article about Marc Fleury. It's more about the business and personal end of his life than about the technology he's helped to create." From the article: "But while Fleury, like Neo, is something of a cult figure, few people in the old or new software world want to think of him as their savior. Brash, outspoken, and frequently insulting, Fleury has clawed his way to the top of the open-source pile over the past six years. Part of the dislike arises because he's a threat. Even though JBoss brings in only $50 million a year in revenues, at most, from providing training, support, and maintenance services to its users, it has siphoned off some hundreds of millions in market value from the likes of BEA Systems and IBM by giving away free software."

Comments

Fleury's Response

[retinaburn]

http://jboss.org/jbossBlog/blog/mfleury/2006/04/01 /JBoss_the_Bad_Boys_of_Open_Source.txt

Re:I hate typos.

[slavemowgli]

He's definitely not a cult figure, at least, that's for sure. People like RMS, Linus, John "maddog" Hall and so on are cult figures. Larry Wall is a cult figure, in a way. But Fleury? I'm pretty sure most people won't even know him; if you did a survey among FOSS developers and asked them whether they knew who Fleury is, I'd bet that 99 out of 100 wouldn't (and the last one would be one who happens to work on JBoss).

Of course, I just pulled that data out of my arse, so you shouldn't quote me on the exact figures. But seriously...