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"We as a community should simply put it straight - open source does not mean free anymore, does not mean quality and those people are not innocent. This a simple marketing move of a commercial company."

Community-driven OSS vs. Company-driven OSS. That's the question.

>Community-driven OSS vs. Company-driven OSS. That's the question.

yes! good point.

Some people make money while contributing their source code. I don't see any problem in that.

So, Marc Fluery sell JBoss the company. So what? Is the source code still there? Yes. Can you fork it to create another application server? Yes. Can you start your own company creating derivative of the source code? Yes. Of course, when you do all that, you have to open source your derivative as well.

When Marc Fluery sell JBoss the company, he sold the company, the people inside, the expertise and whatever assets they have, EXCEPT the source codes. The source codes already belong to the community, and the community can do whatever the hell they want with the source code for all he cares.

Yes, he gain a bit of a free viral marketing. But if you work in any IT company, source codes is an important IP of the company, their bread and butter. Some company give it for free for the exchange of free marketing, but heck, you can download and use it for free, IN PRODUCTION. Some other open source company can base their product on the same source code if they want to.

I'd say, thats fair enough.

What happened to "well designed software" versus "poorly designed software".

Lets be honest here no one really cares about the community other than the marketing department trying to push this in the face of bigger (and commercial) competitors as a means to kick start an acquisition. There is no community spirit when everyone is freeloading. If there was then the community would be handing over money just like in churches. Nearly all contributors contribute for selfish reasons - ease of maintenance (upgrades), review and improvement, status/ego.....

Software companies have customers who care very little about the other customers in the "community" but who do help immensely in growing a company and its products by paying for the software license and actively engaging in dialog with the development team.

The customers that invest both time and money in the product and company are the community that you can rely on - all others are just cheap distribution channels/carriers to a possible real community member.

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I have voted this down though I do agree with one point raised in the entry which is the consistent voting up of blog entries on DZone by the development team. Personally I think the team should leave the voting up (or down) to other DZone members. This is a much better gauge of traction.

With regard to the knocking of other vendors well this is nothing in comparison to the Rodney's of this world who consistently label every other solution as bloatware even though their own commercial offerings would be considered bloatware if the measurement was based on raw performance.

Voting it down for saying that JBoss didn't innovate on technology - have a decency to at least remotely know what you are talking about. Sad...

Nikita Ivanov.