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Yakov Fain on Oracle's JBoss Acquisition: "Open Source Gotcha"

JDJ has published an article about the rumors that Oracle might buy JBoss
By Yakov Fain
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February 10, 2006 10:30 PM EST
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 11,409
Open Source Gotcha

If you think that selecting an open source software will allow you to use it for free forever, think again.

JDJ has published an article about the rumors that Oracle might buy JBoss. I do not know if it’ll ever happen, but let’s assume for a minute that this is true.  Do you think that  JBoss application server will  remain free? I doubt it.  LGPL license has customer protection clauses  for the acquisition cases.  I know that the current  code base will always remain free, and enthusiasts can  fork new branches as they please, but  the future versions of JBoss may become quite costly. And if you’ve invested lots of time and efforts on creating JBoss-based data centers and deploying applications under this app server, you may need to go shopping again. Hopefully, you did not use any JBoss-specific features in your JEE applications, otherwise you may  need to spend  time on porting this application to the new app server.

This issue is not specific to Oracle/JBoss rumors, feel free to replace JBoss with whatever open source product you use and Oracle with VendorXYZ.

If you do not think that such things are possible, read  Bill Venner’s  post “Rewriting versus Refactoring”. He told a story of a formerly open source Jive, which all of a sudden got a price tag of  $8500 per server 

Do you know what most of the open source vendors dream about? They hope to be bought by a wealthy  VendorXYZ.  And if their dream comes true, you might start getting nightmares.

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Published February 10, 2006 – Reads 11,409
Copyright © 2006 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
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About Yakov Fain

Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Currently Yakov works on the book for O'Reilly "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". He twits at twitter.com/yfain.

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Most Recent Comments
Yakov Fain 02/24/06 06:22:58 PM EST

Nicolas,

I'm not planning to write an article on how to chose the app server, cause I'm not sure they are needed at all for majority of the applications.
Nicolas Lavalle 02/24/06 03:37:38 PM EST

Yakov,
I enjoy the article, and it makes a nice observation, everybody wants to be rich.
Have you wrote any articles on how to choose an app server?
Thanks
Nicolas
Mitchell Sojdehei, Ph.D. 02/24/06 02:38:01 AM EST

This is madness. How can we compete and manage IT when the rules change during acquisitions? Isn't there a government regulatory body that can oversea and stop these things from happening. For how long are we to be hostage to greed in the software industry? If they promise open source, then open source it must stay! no fine prints anywhere should ever change that!
news desk 02/10/06 11:28:01 PM EST

JDJ has published an article about the rumors that Oracle might buy JBoss. I do not know if it'll ever happen, but let's assume for a minute that this is true. Do you think that JBoss application server will remain free? I doubt it. I wonder if LGPL license has some customer protection clauses for the acquisition cases? At least the future versions of JBoss may become quite costly. And if you've invested lots of time and efforts on creating JBoss-based data centers and deploying applications under this app server, you may need to go shopping again. Hopefully, you did not use any JBoss-specific features in your JEE applications, otherwise you'll need to spend time on porting this application to the new app server.