Marc Fleury, I hate to say it, but you''re doomed. If you have *real* passion behind JBoss and what it represents, your slick VCs will strip your enterprise dry as they encourage you to take a quiet backseat along the way. After all, they know how to run a business, and you''re just a propellor head to them. I could tell that you didn''t write the comments attributed to you, because the VCs have their own "speak" that instantly erodes your company''s credibility. Save yourself now, and institute a "poison pill" agreement that makes it impossible for these scheming VCs to steal your business from you. They are terribly slick and convincing, but in the end, they will compel you to hire their cronies, expropriate control from you, and run your business into the ground. Don''t say you weren''t warned.

if you read their site and how JBoss implements open source J2EE, you see that JBoss is mostly developed by JBoss inc. It is trivial that they pay salaries to do that. I would be very glad to get paid to do free software! I think it is the future and if there are venture money then even better, as it means it will work

Obviously a great deal of people who haven''t much knowledge about what they comment. The Riz here is one of them:

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you open source programmers need to wise up and take control of your own intellectual property or stop contributing to these bastardized efforts, as you are preventing legitimate companies from making a profit. By providing free programming services to JBoss and Redhat and the European MySQL company you are taking away the profits from companies like BEA and Sun and Oracle who hire programmers and provide them with a living. Anyway, who is paying your own salaries?
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Maybe you should take a look on both JBoss Group and MySQL, both the companies and their license policies?

Both these companies actually employ a group of relatively smart developers, and they both say that more than 80% of the product development come from the employed people. Well, these guys actually need a job and som wages, and it should be quite obvious that the companies need revenues in order to pay them.

Why is there so many people in this industry that haven''t yet grasped the difference between offering a FOSS product and being a non-profit, charity organization?

Well, my company actually pays the wages for about 0,5 developer per year for contributing to JBoss. That''s because the company are greatful for being allowed to use JBoss and because we believe we can re-gain the money from customers who understand our core knowledge. But sadly, also we need bred & butter, so we don''t give anything away for free to our customers.

The motivations for this move are something to wonder at. JBoss, as a consulting company and like all consulting companies, is easy to be profitable. You simply run it like an agency: subcontracting to 1099 contractors and taking a margin. At worst, you have no sales but no employees or overhead (if you work out of your house). Making the books show a profit is easy.

Since JBoss is profitable, why are they taking VC money? One reason might be that contracting jobs (sales) are bad and they want the cash to improve the software, do marketing, etc to try to goose up sales. Another reason might be that they want to use VC contacts to become higher profile and pave the way for an IPO (possibly right after Google). In neither case is the point actually to get the money: one is to prop up a lagging business and the second is a big gamble to get good positioning.

Mark Fleury should be careful. He is exchanging control for money (which maybe he doesn''t need). Philip Greenspun''s company, Ars Digita, was in a very similar situation (also being a high-profile contractor) and they were destroyed before an IPO (though Philip did ok by getting $7M payoff to get lost before the VCs took over the company and ran it into the ground.) JBoss can easily become Ars Digita redux.

I had always assumed that I would use open source to develop on and then as my applications scaled I would go to a "commercial-quality" appserver like WebLogic. Boy was I wrong! When BEA support shuts you out when everyone knows our problem is a WebLogic bug... When large-transaction commerce and content applications are migrating *FROM* WebLogic *TO* JBoss in order to scale.. And WebSphere ? We won''t even go there (hint: no matter what the IBM sales guys say, don''t EVER try to run it with a database other than DB2!). JBOSS IS THE ONLY COMMERCIAL-QUALITY APPSERVER I KNOW OF - BUT IT''S FREE!!

Congratulations on getting VC on YOUR terms, JBoss. How sweet it is.

Just goes to show what bullshit open source has become. Companies like Redhat and The JBoos Group and some other European company that is supporting MySQL are all milking money from the efforts of 100s of open source programmers who contributed. Just goes to show that there is no such thing as a free lunch - true open source advocates should refuse to contribute to these efforts that end up in profits for the individual few like Mark Fleury.

In any other industry this would be outrageous. Think about a group of individual designers designing a concept car and a process to manufacture it and out comes a company competing against Ford or Toyota saying they are going to take this open source design and provide manufacturing servicdes around it; Oh Really. Same if a research consortium in a group of universtiies invented a cure for AIDS and the profits went to Marky Floury of the AIDS Pharma Group - uh huh.

Why does out industry accept such bullshit - you open source programmers need to wise up and take control of your own intellectual property or stop contributing to these bastardized efforts, as you are preventing legitimate companies from making a profit. By providing free programming services to JBoss and Redhat and the European MySQL company you are taking away the profits from companies like BEA and Sun and Oracle who hire programmers and provide them with a living. Anyway, who is paying your own salaries? Are you sure that you are not using that paid time to contribute to open source - is that not cheating? Should you not be working on your own project that the compnay that is hiring you is paying you for?

Enough said

Uh, as opposed to companies like BEAS and IBM that pocket larger sum of money through outrageous licensing terms and service fees? Think of the Jboss Group as a consulting company. They provide services, just like you providing your programming service to a company. Maybe their customer should stopping paying you too?

Wonder how long the open source community wants to support a company where the profits are pocketed by individuals, I know I won''t.

Fast, easy, and FREE! When will Sun learn?

C''mon JBoss: Give IBM''s Webschmear a smackdown, they need a good, hard thrashing for their Ghengis Khan approach to foisting their "technology" on us!

That''s great for JBoss and open source in general. Maybe now they''ll stop trying to make me buy $10,000 developer contract for feedback on REAL bugs in their appserver and choice of web engine...And now Marc F. can afford to fly first-class all over the world :)