[LWN.net]

JBoss

[This article was contributed by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

A few weeks ago a group of JBoss developers split from The JBoss Group and decided to strike it out on their own as the Core Developers Network (CDN). We spoke with Greg Wilkins, one of the Core Developer Network members as well as the founder and director of Mort Bay Consulting. Mort Bay sponsors development of the Jetty Java HTTP server and servlet container. Marc Fleury, President of the JBoss Group, refused to comment for this story.

Wilkins wrote that his experience with JBoss Group had been less than profitable. "I got 6 hours of support work for being on call for 2 years - I also was not pushing my own Jetty support business to JBG clients so I was loosing sales of my own." Wilkins also said that Fleury demanded a cut of a deal that he had negotiated through Mort Bay for out-source development that used JBoss "among many other things."

We did not expect to make money from writing our code. But when somebody started making lots of money by selling access to US the developers (not selling distributions of the code or anything) - then we felt we at least deserved a fair share of the branding and scalable income. Not just to get paid for the hours we worked - we can get that anywhere.

Since leaving the project, Wilkins noted that the names of the Core Developers have been removed from the JBoss site as contributors, though they still have CVS access to JBoss and continue to contribute to the project. JBoss has also replaced Jetty with Tomcat as the default Web container. Wilkins says that the Core Developers do not want to fork JBoss, but "we can see situations that may force that to happen." In the end, there are really two main issues, says Wilkins:

I guess for me there are two aspects to this. One is commercial dispute between parties - no real big issue there I think they are bastards who have screwed me and I'm sure they think the same about me - we are probably both right :-)

But the other is the control of an open source project. It appears that getting control over just the trademark and CVS write access can be used to build a very good control mechanism over an open source community. This can be used to build a near monopoly on commercial services sold for that project and distribution of those benefits.

While Fleury refused to comment for this story, it's interesting to note something he said in an interview on TheOpenEnterprise.com:

The answer is yes. I also believe there's a monopolistic opportunity in open source infrastructure, just like Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop. Free software will create a market that is much more open than that, but we see ourselves becoming a standard, used everywhere, while other application server vendors are struggline. That's our end goal, to become a monopolistic but responsible provider of Web infrastructure.

As open source continues to grow in popularity, and profitability, this will undoubtably be an increasingly important issue. While the JBoss code is available for anyone to use, distribute and modify, the trademark is controlled by a single party. The ability to contribute code and participate in the direction of the project is also controlled by the same people who are making it a business venture. Certainly these abilities could be abused to give one party an advantage over other companies or individuals seeking to make money from the code. Withholding the ability to use the trademark, for example, could certainly hinder the ability of other parties to build a business that centers around JBoss.

Free and open source software licenses only protect access to the code itself. Any business based on an open source project will need to be able to advertise and promote itself -- something that could prove difficult if they are unable to use the name of the project in their advertising or marketing materials. Developers who are contributing to other open source projects may wish to ask the owners of those projects to clarify their long-term intentions for the projects. If nothing else, the JBoss situation may prove a cautionary tale for other business-minded open source developers. According to Wilkins, things would have been much different if they had gotten the business aspects taken care of earlier.

...by the time we came to really formalize it, it was too late as Marc owned the trademark, the company, had the client contracts, the www site and the CVS access. So we were had all lost our bargaining positions. If we had formalized it two years earlier before JBoss was really big and was generating significant revenue - the deal would have been substantially different.

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