Open Source Business Model (Score 1)

I have taken the time to read through the nearly 100 posts on this site about the Authorized Consultant program. Some are incredibly insightful and people get the model. The JBoss brand today is becoming a powerful one and JBoss Group is spending this money we make to make the brand even more powerful. Our authorized consultants that have had the foresight to become associated with JBoss early on, are starting to see the reward for their willingness to make an investment in their business. 5K when you do the math is not a lot of money to a real business, especially when 3K goes directly to the cost of training. The training we provide is performed directly from the people who are responsible for writing JBoss. Those who made the comparisons to other vendors certification programs, I would be shocked if one of the lead developers from Oracle was giving you your training to lead to certification. Would William Gates, the CTO of Microsoft, ever provide training? Both Marc Fleury, President of JBoss Group and Scott Stark CTO of JBoss Group provide training to people seeking certification. We welcome people with the vision to get involved with JBoss. Think of things in this respect, if you can help a company save $$$$$$ by not buying WebLogic, Websphere, SunOne, .NET, Oracle AS, etc and push them towards JBoss, don't you think they will have more money to pay for consultants? Don't you think they will seek the JBoss experts in the industry to help them migrate off of the competing commercial products? Don't you think this will eventually help Open Source in general? If Open Source in going to continue its' push into the enterprise, business models like this are needed. We want Open Source to take over the infrastructure space. Everyone in the Linux community deserves a lot of credit for pushing things this far. Large corporations will not move towards Open Source for mission critical systems without the support orgainzation in place. We want to share the support structure with the Open Source community.