Roy Russo wrong on so-called badgeware

My friend and former JBoss collegue, Roy Russo has come out in the "attribution" aka adware debate in favor of adware. Matt Asay agrees with him and has thus given him airtime on his InfoWorld blog and thus Google news.

Simply put - It stops the Larrys of the world from taking your code, branding it with their big fat "O", making a mint off of it, and never paying you a nickle. Its another method that open source companies have found to create cash from "free" (or "monetizing" - stupid word).

First, I would like to point out, with no disrespect to Red Hat (in fact in tribute), that Red Hat did not write the vast majority of what Oracle has branded as their Linux distribution. Red Hat is not very like JBoss in the sense that while JBossAS has an enormous number of dependencies, the core components that make it an "Application Server" are written by JBoss. Red Hat does write a lot of code by joining employees with existing projects (or hiring from in some cases) that are ultimately packaged into its Linux distribution, but the core of its operating system is written by someone else (albeit Alan Cox is a big part of it). The company that Larry Ellison is the executive of, Oracle, is taking a shorter route by removing Red Hat's branding and selling it as its own Linux distribution. Supposedly they may make changes, this constitutes a derivative work. You can argue that they are freeloading on Red Hat or even open source by only riding on top of Red Hat and maintaining a big fork (which theoretically individual projects could go grab the patches from if they blow a lot of time with SRPMs and diff). However, creating "derivative works" is not supposed to be prevented (as you suggest) by the very definition of open source written by OSI.

In fact, Roy, Matt Asay is the Vice President of Business Development at a company which provides, from what I hear, a very good Enterprise content Management solution built on top of your baby, JBoss Portal. JBoss Portal is built on top of JBoss Application Server, Hibernate and other products. JBoss Application Server is built on hundreds of open source projects including some written by volunteers to Apache, including Tomcat and Xerces. It is also built on independent projects like Javassist and cgLib. I have a lot of respect for Matt Asay and the Alfresco gang, not only as technologists but as business pioneers. However, I think both you and they are being short-sighted here. The reason open source works is because of derivative works. In fact, I think Matt Asay and Co. are shrewd enough to have chosen an alternative to Portal if it had these "badgeware" (adware) restrictions. First, if all of the above projects had similar restrictions that would be a lot of screen real estate. Any kind of licensing scheme would have been more than Alfresco would have been willing to bite off in the early stages, "you want what percentage of our customer's dollar?". If this licensing scheme had taken off in the early days then, depending on the most prevalent terms regarding UI persistence, I think JBoss would have been inviable as a company and Alfresco would have never been a customer. In fact, forget the amount of screen real estate. Some "exhibit B" licenses are requesting SPECIFIC screen real estate. If that happened then it would have been inviable to create aggregate derivative works withusing two packages which use the same licenses.

Back to Red Hat and Oracle: In fact the Oracle thing is so far a big dud. It shaved points off the stock (full disclosure: I do not currently own any Red Hat stock but may benefit from the stated "earn out"), and I mentioned I thought that was crazy. However, the stock as rebounded. As it turns out investors were more concerned in the long term about the effects if Red Hat was unable to capitalize on its acquisiton of JBoss. As news reports started reflecting a positive message regarding the JBoss acquisition and Red Hat's profitability, the stock rose. In fact, that is pretty sensible. Red Hat has a brand, services and this fuzzy thing that Marc Fleury used to call "IK" before he started promoting cosmetic products. Intellectual Knowledge. The idea that the people not working with the inards of a code base on a day to day basis won't be able to provide the same level of support as those that do. Oracle has a brand, but a limiting brand (because they tend to fail at things not directly DB related) in some ways. Red Hat's brand is more effective on their home turf. Oracle's service is also renowned for long hold times and ineffective answers. Red Hat's service is less encumbered.

Bottom line, Roy is that Open Source is writting software "under the gun". If a customer doesn't think that you're doing a good job they will fork it and go into business themselves or someone else will (i.e. Oracle). The market then decides. Matt wants to "let the market decide" what "open source" is.

But it's a thorny issue, and one that OSI prefers to move slowly on. That said, I agree with you: the OSI needs to act or risk irrelevance. I, personally, can see both sides of the attribution debate, and I think the market is largely deciding the issue for us. The market seems to be quite happy with SugarCRM, Zimbra, Alfresco, SocialText, and other companies that use attribution. Perhaps the OSI's vote won't matter much in the end?

This is a very dangerous thing for an OSI board member to say. OSI considers itself the abitrator of what is and is not open source. Matt is trying to negate that (while on the board) and say "its up to the market". Well if I put an ad in the phone book that says "Heavy Tractor Sales" and send you a used jet ski, I have committed an act of fraud. I can utter a Clintonian, "let the market decide what a 'heavy tractor' is", but I still shipped you a used jet ski and he still... There is a long dispute over whether OSI owns "open source" as a trademark or not. I question whether it is still in a position to assert it, but "come on!" you guys are potentially creating a class software that can't be aggregated together even under the same license! A class of software that you wouldn't use in your product for practical reasons (every screen has millions of pixels dedicated to ads). You want to call that open source?? Get real! (BTW none of their licenses have been approved by OSI YET)

Guys, why are you trying to redefine open source to include this new economic inefficiency (aka profit) when your companies depend upon and are built upon this economic efficiency (aka cost-savings/shared resources)! BTW, My bet to any Red Hat employee that will take it: first million dollar deal that Oracle nearly blows with its Linux...they start reselling Red Hat support and become just another channel partner (probably with a fat NDA at first). I bet it happens inside 3 years.

BTW, Buni Meldware Communication Suite including the Webmail component are both open source and free software. We like it coding with a gun to our head. We are actively seeking partners for our upcoming business launch for our multi-platform groupware product (which enables email, calendaring, and webmail in an easy to administer package). Those partners may rebrand the webmail client if it makes them happy :-).

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