Another 15 years of Java: JBoss' Fleury on the GPL, IBM, patents and Microsoft

Marc Fleury, founder of the GPL J2EE implementation JBoss, says Sun made a shrewd move on Java licensing -- but other companies' licensing machinations are putting the industry into a kind of "nuclear terror".

By Richard Hillesley, LinuxWorld.com, 11/27/06

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Fleury also responded to the recent Oracle announcement that it planned to release a clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This followed months of speculation that Oracle was planning to buy out Red Hat or JBoss, or both. “This for me is a show statement,” he said. “You can analyze it at a product offering level, which means providing actual product and support, and Red Hat and JBoss are good at that. We understand how to lead open source communities, and how to create product out of that. And we know how to support our product. If you analyze the statement at that level, they're attacking us on our turf. And they have a lot to prove.”

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Oracle would have to replicate the developer ecosystem that Red Hat has built over many years, and earn the trust of the community and build partnerships with hardware and software vendors. “Not that they can't do this but it's going to take time, and we have such a lead in the ecosystem and the market share, that in three years they'll still be in second place, and it doesn't make sense, so that's not what's motivating them," he said.

“There's a dynamic of 'if nobody moves, nobody gets hurt,' well, Larry moved, and he moved at a level that was designed to create [fear, uncertainty, doubt] with the press, and FUD with the investors, to hurt our stock price and slow our momentum. And most people, our customers, the analysts and investors, and many members of the press see right through that story and see it for what it is, which is an attack by Larry to try and slow our financial capacity.”

From Fleury's perspective the recent Microsoft/Novell agreement is another beast altogether. “We do not have a patent portfolio,” he noted, “so that war is not being played on our field, but on another level entirely. As much as we control our own product and support destiny, we can't compete on that front. So it triggers a different set of dynamics, with respect to IBM, in terms of patent portfolios, and as for the outcome of that anybody's guess is as good as mine.”