In his latest JBoss blog at JBoss.com, Enterprise Open Source Conference 2006 keynoter Marc Fleury (pictured) writes:

Marketing spin aside, the strategy is "OSS Strip Mining" which is taking open source software built by a community and "Bluewashing" or "Blending" within proprietary, closed source offerings; forking/changing the open source code as needed in the process. The community does not benefit from this, but IBM and BEA shareholders absolutely benefit.

A perfect example is IBM WebSphere Community Edition. It is based on the Apache Geronimo open source project and is "Bluewashed" whereby Geronimo is strip-mined for whatever is useful, then combined with other ingredients, etc. While the resulting product is sometimes free, it is no longer "open source" by any stretch of the imagination. This again is why competing commercial vendors prefer BSD-style licensing. It enables this “stealing” from the community, or in marketing-speak “leveraging”. At JBoss, we prefer FSF licenses, such as LGPL, that prevent the strip-mining while at the same time allowing end users and ISVs to reuse our code. Our users deserve the stability and comfort of knowing that the distribution of JBoss they are using is the same one that everyone else is running.

Another commercial software "strategy" is proprietary software "Waste Dumping". Think BEA with Beehive. This is the opposite of strip-mining in that it entails the commercial vendors "donating" some technology to open source. Eager to be part of the open source wave, the vendor identifies some technology that is inferior or of limited value to them, and they dump (oops...sorry...they "donate") it into open source. BEA is probably the worst offender here. There has been so much Waste Dumping going on lately that we may very well need an "Open Source landfill" to deal with the cleanup of all of this waste and its damage to our environment. I’m sorry ladies and gentlemen, but we like our communities clean and not taken for fools.

JBoss has always been about pure open source. We started in OSS and we will die in OSS. It rubs me the wrong way when our competitors mischaracterize us, the real developers of FOSS, for not being OSS-enough according to their view of the world. The fact that our LGPL license prevents them from strip-mining us is the real problem. Professional OSS paired with subscription services is what customers want... Not bait and switch, not “Geronimo is for the third world” as I recently heard an IBM exec say at the MIT conference.

JBoss is based on the assumption that everyone deserves “world-class” software, fully-loaded with ALL the features. Professional OSS is our livelihood and is a proven model that is driven by customer value. It also drives shareholder value IF you construct your business model properly. Shifting from a software license revenue model to a subscription revenue model is PAINFUL for big vendors like BEA and IBM who need to protect their sacred cows so Wall Street doesn't devalue them.

Don’t believe the hype and the FUD. Pure open source has no gimmicks, and the users and customers will settle the score. At JBoss, what you see is what you get and what we support.

Peace, Love and Pure Open Source.

• Open Source JBoss CEO Marc Fleury On How to Build a Company