JBoss Founder Hard-Nosed About Open Source 423
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?"
Again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, 1990 called. They want their open-source-failure theory back!
Re:Again? (Score:3, 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.
Most businesses would be i
Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Again? (Score:2, Interesting)
Or the fact that they increased subsciptions by 400% right after CentOS became well known also leads me to believe you.
Yep, you're definately right. All Fortune 1000 companies download unsupported software off of the internet to power their $5 million mainframes or their 32 way servers.
In-fact, Sun saw Red Hat going bankrupt and loved the idea so much that this is the exact reason t
Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
The same could be said of commercial software development...
Re:Again? (Score:3, Interesting)
I would say that probably 90% or more commercial software projects fail in that they never become self-sustaining. And I am willing to bet that even many of the fairly large software houses have substantial failure rates for their own projects. How many projects that Microsoft works on never make it to the store shelf? How about with
Re:Again? (Score:2)
The difference between open source and business is that in open source your failures belong to the community. All that failure is visible so people can learn from it, can take ideas, bits and pieces from it and try again. In business you don't have that.
"The alternative is they give you nothing, you starve, someon
"Hippies" were often subsidized, so not charity (Score:3, Insightful)
The "hippies" writing OSS were not as charitable as you suggest. Many were getting paid or compensated, just not by their software customers. A cushy academic job where you get to choose you own area of research and/or projects, a student working school project, etc.
I'm not saying people did not give away code they wrote on their own time, I did, so did others, it just wasn't called OSS in the 80s and early 90s. However a lot of open s
Re:Again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Has it, really? How many non-trivial, successful open source software projects aren't written mostly by staff paid to do the job? Pretty much all of the biggest names have some sort of commercial entity behind them, and those commercial entities expect to make money from the OSS-based work they do, by some means or other. The specific economic model may be non-traditional, but the underling economic principles certainly aren't!
Re:Again? (Score:3, Insightful)
i would say my project is a success just because it is in use.
How to define success (Score:3, Interesting)
This guys seems to think success of open source is when hobbyists work for free, and failure is when companies work for free [by paying their staff to do open source instead of something else].
When a company works for free, surely that is the bigger success, a company decides more on the balance sheet than hobbyists who decide based on hobby.
If open source profits companies, then it is success by his own terms!
This guy wants the companies that work on open sourc
Re:Again? (Score:2)
Your logic leaves a great deal to be desired.
Re:Again? (Score:2)
It would do, if what you wrote had been been equivalent to what I wrote, but I'm afraid I don't see how it was. The point I was making had far more to do with the scale of projects than their prominence; there just happens to be some correlation between the two in the most well-known cases.
Re:Again? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the wrong question to ask. I'd argue that any piece of open-source software that is non-trivial, successful and serves a purpose that is of interest to companies *will* eventually attract funding, including developers paid for by companies, but that doesn't mean that open-source must have a commercial (paid) developer base to be successful. You have the direction reversed here: success leads to paid development, not vice versa.
The *real* question you'd have to ask is how many successful, non-trivial FOSS projects were *started* by people with a commercial interest (companies), and if you do that, things will certainly look differently. Tools like the GNU system, the Linux kernel itself, PHP, Perl and so on were all started without any commercial help - it was only later on, when they were already successful, that they attracted commercial help. JBoss may be different (or not - I don't know its history), but if I had to make an educated guess, I'd say that the amount of FOSS started by companies is by far the minority.
And of course, that's only looking at FOSS that is of interest to companies, anyway, which gives a skewed picture, since there are several important projects and high-profile projects (not to mention countless smaller ones) that cater to a different target group - namely, end users themselves, who arguably are both more important and more abundant than companies.
Apache Ant: no full time employees, no corporation (Score:5, Interesting)
I am really pissed off with the "amateur" quote. Ant was built by its end users, but they were software developers, each solving their own little problem. As most software dev problems are common, the tool shares out. but amateur? Software professional in their spare time is more accurate.
If there is one thing that OSS has shown, it is that
1. full time software teams do not produce better quality products than the amateurs (example: Linux v. windows)
2. end user involvement produces products that meet user needs far better than a marketing department telling engineers in cubicles what to do.
Imagine if Ant was a private company. We'd have to have meetings with the VCs. We'd have a marketing department. We'd have to deliver things on deadlines, whether they were ready or not. And we' d have to convince the world we were better than a planet full of software developers collaborating to solve their own problems, and sharing the results. This is what jboss are like: they have to slag off the rest of the OSS community, to justify their very existence.
-Steve
Re:Apache Ant: no full time employees, no corporat (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Apache Ant: no full time employees, no corporat (Score:3, Insightful)
The professional programmer working on a project on the side "for free" is still a professional programmer, not an amateur. That said, there is nothing wrong with "amateur". There's also nothing about Open Source that says it should, or is likely to be, primarily produced by unpaid volunteers. It can be a purely self-interested economic decision by a company to use and produce Open Source software.
Re:Again? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does it have to be one or the other? Why wouldn't a company start off a project intending it to be Open Source? It actually makes more sense that most projects will be done by companies (who have the resources) than by a small group of people developing it on their own. This image of Open Source being driven by "hobbyists" (and what's wrong with them?) is a myth. It certainly allows for that kind of project, but it isn't predicated on it.
Another misused word being tossed around is "amateur". The w
Who? (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, I suppose I could look him up, but if he's making these statements as if people should listen to him, shouldn't he kind of be a known person? I can make statements all day long too...but since I'm a nobody like this guy why should anyone listen to me? Why is anyone even reading this post?
Don't mod me as anything.
Sounds Like He Knows What He's Talkikng About (Score:5, Interesting)
I found it interesting that he distinguishes between different types of software, implying that there would be vastly different business models for each -- "don't try this at home" I would have liked to have seen the interviewer nail him down on this a little more -- I think there is some good stuff there but without the details its hard to know whether he knows what he's talking about or not.
What's spaghetti got to do with hurricanes? [whattofix.com]
Re:Sounds Like He Knows What He's Talkikng About (Score:2, Interesting)
Not as bad as story summary makes it sound (Score:5, Informative)
He's not making a blanket statement about open source developers being Hari Krishnas, he's talking about hecklers in his audience.
Re:Not as bad as story summary makes it sound (Score:2)
Open Source works similar as the Internet. Just to remind you the persons who make content accessible have to pay for the server load. And it works, very succesful. The problem is a
Re:Sounds Like He Knows What He's Talkikng About (Score:2)
If he disses my hobby, because I sit around for countless in my free time working on open-source software, I don't need to know, use or respect the work of his company. Period.
Re:Sounds Like He Knows What He's Talkikng About (Score:2)
They seem to have a wider view of web infrastructure, from the list of programs.
He knows no more (Score:3, Informative)
Different cases, sure, but the same short-sightedness and same origins - the "I'm better than you, 'cos I'm richer".
If... (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot of my motivation for contributing is a way saying thanks.
How does he pay for all of his foundations? Or is he just a taker?
Since his stuff is Free (if it is) you can look at it as who cares?
One thing with people who only do it for the money is that I tend not to trust them not to make things unnecessarily complex in order to earn the service/consulting money.
In any case... Go Free Software.
all the best,
drew
Re:If... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:If... (Score:2)
As to being a dirty hippie, I missed that movement by about ten years. My hair got longer than I wear it today, but it never really made it down to my shoulders. Dirty? Well, no shower yet this morning so I am not totally fresh, but I wouldn't go so far as dirty.
Clearly, in peering at me through the internet, your fibre got crossed and you saw someone else.
all the best,
drew
Re:If... (Score:2)
all the best,
drew
How they weasel (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny you should mention that, while he is a two faced sleazeball, at least according to several friends who know him and some who used to work for him, he does indeed keep his work truly open. That is the beginning though, not the end. It was also built on the backs of free authors, at least one of which was a good friend.
Now, the trick they use is to purposely not document their work, it is free indeed, but just try to use it. Oh, you want support? Write a check to.....
Now, you have to remember this is the same guy who called Jonathan Schwartz "a ponytailed clown from McKinley". Now, good old JS does sport a ponytail, but the last time I saw him, the clown makeup was notably absent. Not sure about the McKinley bit though.
All this is second hand, but it comes from people who were starry-eyed groupies until they realized the intracicies of his 'management' style and told him where to cram his philosophy.
-Charlie
P.S. If you want stories about him, ask at TheServerSide.com, especially about posting under multiple pseudonyms to back up a failing arguement.
P.P.S In case you don't notice, I don't think highly of him, but I am one of the smiling happy people compared to those who know him.
Re:How they weasel (Score:3, Insightful)
"One thing with people who only do it for the money is that I tend not to trust them not to make things unnecessarily complex in order to earn the service/consulting money."
My point exactly. I think the tactic is so unnecessay and counterproductive. There are always going to be real problems and opportunities and people will always pay to make their lives
Rattling The Tiger Cage (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Just let him say what he wants. (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re:Just let him say what he wants. (Score:2)
Ridiculously mischaracterized article (Score:5, Interesting)
Added value... (Score:4, Insightful)
Kjella
VALUE ADDED!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Game publishers, book publishers, movie companies, tv stations, music labels and so on usually have to pay someone for what they use.
Its true what he says (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Its true what he says (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe you need to stop smoking the bowl.
Better than it sounds (Score:5, Interesting)
itself is interesting, if brief. I think the case against "OSS" from a
purely business point of view is quite strong; but this doesn't worry
me, since I'm not in the business, and I prefer Free Software [gnu.org]
anyway.
Re:Better than it sounds (Score:2)
He just puts it more bluntly, than other skeptics (Score:2)
Maybe this is an area where Open Source organizations can do a little better PR. They can explain how most of us came up using Free Software, and want to similarly contribute back; bytes are free - it costs nothing to contribute something you did because it interested you; not everyone is driven by profit motive; etc...
Of course,
Re:He just puts it more bluntly, than other skepti (Score:2)
http://www.jboss.org/company/pos [jboss.org]
So, he obviously seems to think you can make money writing "open source" software.
Lately, I am thinking that a more interesting question is one that should be on the minds of Free Software users...
What are some important factors that I should look at in assessing "the total development environment" of the software I am depending on?
all the best,
drew
http://yp.peercast.org/?find=bysa&Submit=Search [peercast.org]
the art of open source (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of them. Some artists do actually starve for their art, although this is perhaps a romanticized minority. Nonetheless, the general principle holds true: people driven to create art have less time for day jobs -- or if they're confined to day jobs, their souls suffer for want of art.
Thus with some coders, who give it away: they are driven to create the art of open source.
-kgj
Re:the art of open source (Score:4, Informative)
Q: Could you elaborate on why the OpenBSD team is so committed to releasing its software free of charge and free of restriction?
The first thing to recognize about OpenBSD is that there are about 80 developers and we do OpenBSD for ourselves only. Lots of other people use OpenBSD, but we use it for ourselves. It's just for ourselves--and that means I want OpenBSD to run on everything I've got. I want OpenBSD to work no matter what things come along in the future. This means that we have to have an outside community that will help us with supporting new devices and new technologies. We can't be too 'fringe.' So that means we have to have a user community. But we have a user community only because it benefits us, ourselves.
Re:the art of open source (Score:2)
a) Write documentation
b) Backport fixes
c) Fix spaghetti/cancer code
d) Track down memory leak
e) Verify, assign and fix bugs
f) Formal point release
g) Start off on some new and wonderful feature which has tickled their creativity.
Of course, you might say others should do that, not artists. Have you ever experienced how fun it is to clean up someone else's mess? I'd rather do any one of a-g) on my own code
Re:the art of open source (Score:2)
funding art (Score:2)
Ideal in theory; but in practice, I'm guessing (I don't know this for a fact) that only a small percentage of artists get any funding. I'm thinking here of the United States, where the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts is less than the budget for US military brass bands. (Literally -- figure from Harper's Index.) Moreover the NEA as an institution -- along with Public Televi
eternal dilemma (Score:2)
This is the eternal dilemma.
Some lucky few artists find patrons, or markets for their work.
Most don't. Of these, some struggle on as best they can, some go without art altogether, some go mad with art or the lack of it.
I believe that the public at large, if polled, would agree: art is good for us, it enriches our souls, teaches us about ourselves.
But wh
The Giver gives to the evil and the good alike (Score:2)
The Giver gives to the evil and the good alike. There are many fools, who receive in plenty, yet are thankless.
Pauris 20 -27 http://srec.gurmat.info/srecpublications/sabadgur u suratdunchela/chapter7.html [gurmat.info]
from Jupji Sahib by Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Nanak [wikipedia.org]
I don't get it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't get it. (Score:2)
You see, there's this little thing called "jealousy"...
Welcome to capitalism (Score:2)
Take note IBM Inc., Google Inc., and most other touchy-feely open companies with more than just one person on the payroll. Take Redhat Inc., who were built on the efforts of volunteers whose work gradually became subsumed into a profit-driven entity only to snip the umbilical cord of the "hippie dream" after Redhat Version 9.
Yeah, welcome to capitalism fellow hippie
I disagree (Score:3, Informative)
Not really. Java has continued to be a thorn in the side of the GNU camp because of it's licensing issues. His product has been built from the ground up and serves as a platform for the deployment of non-free software. Thus, he does not stand on the shoulders of those he scorns.
THIS IS THE SAME JBOSS (Score:4, Informative)
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/04/22 12228&tid=108 [slashdot.org]
And yhea its the Inquirer but still worth a read:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=9504 [theinquirer.net]
JAVA DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL Editor-in-chief Alan Williamson has recently awarded Marc Fleury with the title "JBoss's own worst enemy" in his blog (http://alan.blog-city.com/readblog.cfm?BID=77874 [blog-city.com]) . It appears that there were some polling inconsistencies with the JDJ awards and that the JBoss Group's CEO gave Williamson quite the verbal lashing in a letter earlier this week. Williamson reacted by publishing Fleury's email in his blog.
Re:THIS IS THE SAME JBOSS (Score:2)
What a novel concept!
Re:THIS IS THE SAME JBOSS (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder about that "walk-out" though. These "Core Developers" are all part of the JBoss Community still, right?
Also, there hasn't been any news from the Core Developers [coredevelopers.net] since 2003, when they walked out.
Meanwhile, Marc Fleury and JBoss appears to be doing well [businessweek.com].
Re:THIS IS THE SAME JBOSS (Score:3, Interesting)
As if you had to appologize for that after the 'journalistic integrity' of the story summary.
There's been way too many of these taken out of context, wildly sensational story summaries that would make the inquirer blush.
I'm glad there is a comment system, it's required reading to put things in perspective.
What's also interesting to see is this vicious defence of anything Open Source here on
Myth? (Score:2, Interesting)
If OSS relied on any one developer, of course it would fail, and I think that is the mistake many det
Re:Myth? (Score:2)
RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:RTFA (Score:2)
The best test of your belief in free speech is when someone says something you don't like.
So, you might mention that to Fleury, who resorts to name calling and denigration when someone says something he doesn't like. I guess that makes Fleury a capitalist pig.
Re:RTFA (Score:2)
If you read the posts, you will see that some people do not think he is following the spirit of Free Software. Making money from it is not the problem for them though.
Isn't this software based on java? Care to comment on his devotion to the spirit of Free Software?
all the best,
drew
http://yp.peercast.org/?find=bysa&Submit=Search [peercast.org]
so.. (Score:2)
2) Fix bug annoying me
3) Submit fix for all
4) ???
5) Profit!
Obviously the OSS community needs to figure out the ??? bit and we'll be rich.
Re:so.. (Score:2)
1) Get some spare time
2) Find bug annoying me
3) Find someone willing to pay me to fix same bug annoying them.
4) Submit fix for all
5) Profit!
Don't make the mistake (Score:2)
(i.e., this whole
Marc Fleury is absolutely right (Score:3, Interesting)
Making money is not dirty, a profitable free software company is not a sell out, and yes professionalism in open source is something that should be encouraged.
Re:Marc Fleury is absolutely right (Score:2)
Yep. It just goes to show you... (Score:2)
Of course it could also be used by terrorists, rightist wackjobs, leftist pinkos, separtist paritsans, guerilla insurgents and the North Koreans.
So think twice before contributing to projects like Freeciv or EMACS...
he also says (Score:2)
Open Source People (Score:2)
He would do better to seek out people who are professional Open Source Vendors like he is, and creative Open Source hobbyists, the kind that write compilers, work on web browsers, GUI toolkits, etc.
If he avoids talking to stupid people at conferences, but instead seeks
Working for free is great (Score:2)
I once saw a poster that read:
This doesn't mean that you work for free, rather you work on something you enjoy enough that you are willing to work on it at home in some sense.
Even if you can't do the same thing at home and at work is somewhat irrelevant.
I have yet to meet a CPA who is an advanced software developer in any language beyond Excel Macros. But then again, I haven't met every CPA in the world either
The Fleury Method(tm) (Score:4, Informative)
2) Issue a mealymouthed pseudo-apology [osdir.com], when you get caught
3) Wait a year, then publicly call your fellow OSS developers "hippies" and "Hari Krishnas" [businessweek.com]
4) ??
5) Profit!!!
Sure nobody wants to work for free--- BUT. (Score:4, Informative)
I work on a video editor, or the docs for openoffice, or beta testing for Blender.
In return you do something similar.
In return, I get a $500 package (openoffice) free without needing to pay taxes.
In return, I get access to code that does 90% of what I want so I only have to write the 10% instead of 100%.
OSS moves ahead because it doesn't have to care about -cash- payments. It can take almost as long as it wants on any project and when it gets "good enough" then it starts eating into the commercial software it compets with.
I passed a key marker in the last 3 months - I no longer install Office on all my boxes. THat followed another key point 6 months ago when I said the default programs were Writer and Calc instead of Word and Excel.
Now I'm seriously looking at Umbuntu and it's very likely I'll be using it 100% on one box.
Anyway- back to my basic point- even businesses can benefit enormously from open source. They get access to code 90% written, write the 10% they need and contribute it back to the stream. This allows them to make deadlines they otherwise could not and to get software that works (bypassing a huge amount of risk) that they only have to tweak.
And some of them are STILL greedy and try to take the free code and hide their changes (fortunately they are getting busted lately).
It's not that hard folks- get thousands of dollars worth of free software- make your business profitable and give just a little bit back.
As a developer... (Score:5, Interesting)
Before I got involved in OSS, I was yearning to get into consulting, but I couldn't seem to find a breakthrough job to establish a reputation. People just didn't want to believe I could do the work. I'm in the magical "recently graduated college" zone where I'm not expereinced enough to be senior but not young enough to be an undergrad consultant.
After I got involved and contributed to an open source project as one of the primary developers, suddenly I had exposure. Sure, I didn't get paid for the work (and we did a lot of work in just 2 months). But that investment has helped me to get a very good consulting job, and I've gotten a lot more exposure because people talk to me about the library and what it does.
It's the best thing to happen to my career since graduating college.
No one will work for free, but who said that we're working for free? I consider my OSS work to be an investment in my repuation and my future career. It certainly has paid off in a very short amount of time.
It's part of the mystique.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Edison did the same thing, bragging about how hard he worked and perspired, somehow missing the fact that he rode to success on the backs of many others. But don't be too hard on these guys. CEOs
Free as in beer? Who said that? (Score:2)
My company works a lot on open source software. And we actually pay our developers to do so.
Is this a hippie dream? No, it's just practical. We use this open source software in our business because it is the best product available - and it's much less expensive and more robust than anything else on the market.
We continue to develop the software because we have needs that go beyond the current implementation. We give back to the communi
Fleury != Politic (Score:3, Informative)
For those of you who aren't familiar with Marc Fleury, he is the stereotype of the maveric, much like many of us. He's used to being the smartest guy in the room, he's used to being right whenever someone disagrees with him, and he doesn't soft peddle the fact that he thinks he's always right. There's an upside and a downside; people don't follow the wishy washy, but maverics tend to come off as assholes.
All that to say, this is just vintage Marc. His view is the only credible view in his world. It has cost him some important allies (eg: his entire core development team last year), and has won him others (eg: lots of venture capital). It will continue to be his hallmark.
I can't stand Fleury.... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've actually had to deal with the JBoss guys on several occasions (I brought them in to compete for a few bids at my company), and I can't stand them. They are the least responsive vendor I have ever seen, and that's saying something. They're more arrogant and confrontational than Reuters or Bloomberg, and that's an almost miraculous achievement.
I am glad that they have succeeded, as if JBoss does for app servers what Linux did for Operating Systems, that will be a good thing. Unfortunately, I see a rocky future for them, probably. It seems that if you want to use the service business model, telling your customers to screw off at every opportunity is not a good plan, and it will hurt you eventually.
I also think their focus is slightly misplaced, but that's a minor technical issue. Presumably it will be fixed as JBoss becomes more mature. With a little time, hopefully by JBoss 5.0, they'll have a much more impressive AS, with fewer weakpoints. Perhaps then they can really strive to fix the few weaknesses they have.
Maybe, he's just pissed... (Score:3, Insightful)
Fleury Is An Idiot (Score:3)
He gets a few million in VC money and he thinks he's Bill Gates.
Nothing he said hasn't been refuted before.
Nothing to see here but another prima donna. Oh, wait, maybe he CAN compare himself to Bill Gates on that basis.
Move along.
Are we really surprised? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just another soulless, scorched earth capitalist. "I relied on other people to make my money, but now, due to the frailty of my own nature, I'm now going to promptly forget what made me a millionaire in the first place, and get down to the usual millionaire activity of destroying the lives of as many people as I possibly can."
And before I get yet another barrage of comments from American reactionaries labelling me a Communist, let me say that I have nothing whatsoever against capitalism, provided that the capitalist in question remembers that they do not exist in a vacuum...that they're part of the larger human race...also that they actually need other people to get their money in the first place. It is capitalism with total disregard for others that I have major problems with. Mind you, the latter is the form that most Americans are familiar with anyway, so I stand corrected...a lot of you probably won't be able to tell the difference.
idiot.moron.asshole.com (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm about as borzhwa as they come.
I spend about 3-6 hours per week working on my yard.
My motivation?
I want my house and my yard to look nice.
Who benefits?
My neighbors who try to sell their houses, it increases neighborhood property values. Do *I* get any kickbacks? Are you shitting me? People do things for reasons other than personal profit all the fucking time.
I benefit, with pride, and personal satisfaction.
I see no difference between my decadent motivations, and the Open Source movement.
This guy's just a "Free Market" capitalist ideologist. Ideology seldom has anything to do with the real world.
My myth is better than your myth (Score:3, Insightful)
"At top of the pyramid, you have these top 2% of developers that are 10 times -- in some cases 100 times -- more productive than the rest."
This is a very popular myth with rathy shaky evidence. Even the most modestly talented develper can write one line of code in 15 seconds. Who do you know that can write 100 lines of code in 15 seconds? Of course any meaningful measure of productivity would go beyond LOC, but that just weakens the case further since there are no established standards for comprehensive software productivity. We can't define productivity in any meaningful way, but we make broad claims about it anyway.
My joke is that 98% of developers believe that they are in the top 2%.
Re:Mr. Fleury doesn't know his way around FLOSS (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mr. Fleury doesn't know his way around FLOSS (Score:2)
Re:Mr. Fleury doesn't know his way around FLOSS (Score:4, Insightful)
However, as he says they seem to get pissed off quite often when they realize he is able to make money of it while they can't.
The interview is pretty vague, however it appears to me that he doesn't particularly like the model where you basically sell service or whatever while using hobbyist to make the actual code. As you yourself pointed out hobbyist have different motivations, which he would probably argue aren't the best for keeping such a business model alive. Even in Linux the main developers, asfaik, are basically paid to work on the Kernel.
"Support Contracts" = "closed source" (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source works because all of us are smarter than one of us. Programmers naturally look for preexisting solutions to problems, because it enables them to get to the thing that they really want to do faster. And they'll naturally return the favor when they can. It's just politeness to contribute bug fixes.
This model has serious, serious flaws. There will always be more takers than givers. But the good news is that distribution is cheap, so one giver can support hundreds of freeloaders.
Other problems are harder. Many of the contributions take place against the background of a standard closed-source project, where the management doesn't mind participating in open source as long as the real product development remains proprietary. A utopian pure open-source environment will fail; the whole thing works as well as it does only because the economics of redistribution are so cheap.
There are many other issues which are not easy to work around, and that's what this guy is really getting at: open source can't promote the non-fun stuff, like good user interfaces and (for the most part) QA. Certain crucial pieces of infrastructure (Apache, Linux kernel) have so many people banging on them that they get QA'ed anyway, and they're so integral to other money-making schemes that it ends up being in some people's interests to do the work anyway. But away from those projects the software gets buggier and buggier, and you'd have to pay people to make them less buggy.
So in the end there's money to be made in the standard business model, which is actually what JBoss is using. The difference is that some of the software they develop "leaks" around the edges into open source, because that's their way of playing nice with other people doing the same thing. The more core something is, the more effective it is to share your work and to use the shares in return; the system supports the freeloaders.
The real money is in doing specific work for specific customers, of which "support contracts" are only a trivial part. "Support contracts" are really just another name for "closed-source, proprietary software" built on top of the open source. And that's just business as usual.
As programmers, we'll share because it's fun and we'll share because we're a community that likes to help each other out. That's at the end of the day; from 9 to 5 we'll continue to write software the way it's always been done, for the same economic reasons: you have to pay people to develop the boring stuff and the stuff that involves knowing the subject domain. The kernel and Apache mean you don't have to know about anything except computers. If you want to build a ticket reservation site or a pharmaceutical database, you actually have to know something outside of computers, and that always costs money.
Re:"Support Contracts" = "closed source" (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, consulting is not a panacea. To increase revenue, you need
Re:"Support Contracts" = "closed source" (Score:3, Interesting)
Arguably PeopleSoft isn't closed source enough. Go to business school, adopt some standards, and quit messing with the software. If yo
Re:Mr. Fleury doesn't know his way around FLOSS (Score:2)
Re:It makes sense (Score:2)
/Mikael
Re:Only one draw-back to open-source. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are kidding right? That or your pretty wrong.
Microsoft and AOL have been adopting something called SPF that was originally presented by one of these F/OSS Hippies.
IIRC TCP/IP was originally developed in F/OSS software because it was Open.
Who did transparent GUI design?
Who first developed a XML based solution for the general group of Office Products?
Who developed and presented the rssmail whitepaper? Hippies or Suits?
What was the first tool for real time chat? IRC or AIM? Who developed it?
Was the first implimentation of a Web Browser (Mosaic) open source or coompany derived?
You forgot to wrap your comments in sarcasm tags or you are an idiot.
Re:Only one draw-back to open-source. (Score:2, Interesting)
It was released public-domain and it was developed in a research center. So you're still right, but I'm just being a nitpicker.
Re:Only one draw-back to open-source. (Score:2)
Imagine a situation where you have some crappy 128kbps Internet link at home, and flat 1.5Mbps at your work? Just like every normal guy, you start your P2P client every Friday and then you pray during the weekend that your download goes Ok. With some help of port forwarding you could access your work machine... except that you don't have PCAnywhere or anything similar installed on one of the points. But if you could have a web access to your download client... Wait a minute, some commerci
Only one draw-back to your post (Score:5, Informative)
On the other hand, you're just wrong.
>They do not innovate w/ new tech-ideas.
Yes, they do. For instance, did you know that the first web browser to do page layout decently (in an "innovative" fashion: you put the pictures in line with the text!) was called NCSA Mosaic. It was distributed with source code. A company called Spyglass bought the rights to it. Microsoft used Mosaic as the basis for IE. For reference, in your browser window, click "Help -> About IE".
The web site you're on now is being served by an open source product called Apache, which was based on the NCSA http server. Apache has many innovative features, not the least of which is its open architecture (making it possible for Apache to run programs written in several different programming languages).
The page layout of this site is done by a program called Slashcode, an open source program. Comment moderation, and meta-moderation, are two technical innovations that came from this open source package.
It's written in PERL, through the Apache mod_perl plugin. PERL was a truly paradigm-shattering open source programming language. PERL was designed for handling strings and administering computer systems. When the web exploded, PERL turned out to be almost perfectly suited to it. Even without the web, PERL is great for doing sysadmin work.
The list would go on, and on, and I am not doing it justice by listing only a few.
The point is that all of the really innovative stuff comes from open collaboration. Closed source people are forced to look at what the market wants, and with one finger in the air can't be truly innovative.
Re:Only one draw-back to your post (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) [wikipedia.org]
"However, despite persistent rumors to the contrary, Mosaic was never released as open source software during its brief reign as a major browser; there were always constraints on permissible uses without payment."
Re:I don't think that's what he was saying (Score:2)
If you re-read his post, it clearly states that he wasn't interested in lining someone else's pockets, while he gets nothing. I see nothing wrong with this.
Re:Jerk (Score:2)