JBoss did not invent the application server market, they played a very important role in commoditizing it and in creating a different business model which made BEA, IBM and Oracle suffer from this move.
I'm not the official JBoss biographer, I'm sure there are many who can tell the story more accurately. My angle in this story is that I see many who believe that if they replicate Fleury's moves they will be as successful as he was.
Take a look at the cumbersome moves of GridGain. I guess those guys tries to answer: 'How can we become a gazillionars like the JBoss guys too?'. I guess this is the strategy they laid out:
- Start a commercial open source company - developers are stupid anyway. Once we'll tell them we're open source they'll love us right away.
- Enterprise Grid - yep. We'll commoditize the enterprise grid market. Who knows about Platform and DataSynapse? We'll kill them by providing Java based enterprise grid solution.
- Nikita will be our Marc Fluery - he will have to post daily in his blog about other software vendors and will bash them daily. By that people will start to believe he's really cool and knows what he's talking about! We'll make sure our family and friends vote for the DZone ranking - no real marketing is needed anymore.
Too me, this is not considered innovation. Fleury innvoated on the business model and not so much on technology, these guys (and other) are not doing that. They may be baught by some giant, one can never know.
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.
I vote against GridGain, until they change their tactics!
Nikita - I'm sure you'll say something about it, you always do!
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