19 June 2006 - 16:07JBoss - professional open source

JBoss is a very unusual open source project. It is an open source project that behaves more and more like a corporation. It doesn’t shy away from money, in fact it sold itself to Red Hat for a lot of money, the price tag being somewhere in the vicinity of 400 million dollars.
What makes it look more like a corporation than a traditional open source project is the lack of organic growth. Once it secured the initial VC funding JBoss has gone on a shopping spree. It has purchased Hibernate, Drools, Arjuna and today Rosseta ESB from Aviva. The vertical integration of its stack is also another facet of the corporate mindset that directs JBoss. JBoss, and Red Hat along the way, seems concerned with the creation of an open-source stack that will supposedly provide their customers with a one-time stop for their enterprise computing needs, they only fall short of a database.
Lack of organic growth, vertical integration, VC funding, etc…, well these are concepts you come across reading Wall Street Journal, not your typical open source online-forum/wiki. JBoss is a corporation (actually, it has been one for a long time) and is very much acting like one, much to the dismay of a large number of developers. This corporate behavior runs counter to what most people think about when thinking about open-source and led to some virulent “Boycott JBoss” campaings.
However, one thing that I find strange the way JBoss Inc. chooses to grow its business is the fact that they are growing a huge stack and charging for training and services (to a certain degree). JBoss seems to be trying to make money by managing the behemoth that you downloaded free of charge, installed and ran into problems with.
This runs counter to the current development mindset where you develop small pieces of software agnostic of the operational environment, you create contracts for plugging them into the operational environment and then adapt the software to the contracts you have created. The world is moving away from large elephants to small and highly adaptive software. JBoss is moving towards the large elephant. It is probably moving from mom and pop IT shops to Fortune 500 companies. Talk about a corporate mindset…