Hats off to JBoss

by admin on April 14, 2006 03:03pm

Congratulations to Marc Fleury and team for their success this week in selling their company to a like-minded partner that pioneered Open Source business models.

Running a startup is hard.  Keeping it going and focused is harder.  Selling it while maintaining your principles is nearly impossible – but JBoss has scored a hat trick.  From 97-2001, I was in a string of startups in Silicon Valley, and I know first hand just how hard it is to make them work.

When a company reaches the level of publicity and success that JBoss has achieved, there are pressures to compromise in many dimensions – exemplified by the rumored half-billion dollars that “a large database company” offered them only last week.  Marc could have taken that and walked out of the industry altogether – enjoying a comfortable life on his own private island.  Instead, he has chosen to marry his company to a long-term resident of the Commercial Open Source Software industry that will sustain the JBoss principle of interoperability and heterogeneous support, and is well-aligned to evolve the business model in a pure Open Source tradition.

My lab is working with JBoss on the technical collaboration project that Microsoft announced earlier this year – good, interesting work – and will be exploring new areas to work on interoperability, such as JBossWeb, an Apache-based web server with native support for .NET, Java, and PHP.

We’re continuing to read and sort the suggestions we’re getting – including emails – and looking for clusters of requests that we can turn in to projects.  What would you like to see us do from a Java interoperability standpoint?  What would be most valuable for you?

Cheers,
Sam