The Lurker

"What open source means to me"

Mike Cannon-Brookes is criticising the way JBoss employees interact with the broader Java development community:

What does amaze me though, is the constant "attitude" shown by JBoss employees. Here is the latest (but by no means isolated) example:

I suppose we can fork Spring and make it do what we want. But it is probably easier just writing our own. The IoC part in Spring is trivial to implement. The hard part is always integration with other services. :)

Fair enough. JBoss has been goofy like this for years now.

But I really hate it when people blog about "what 'open source' means to me":

Then again, putting my "Open Source" hat on I've always maintained that JBoss hasn't been 'open source' - in the true meaning of the term to me - for a long time now. The code has an OSI license, but to me that's only part of being a true Open Source project.

Well, that's just wrong. OSI owns the trademark "Open Source". They get to say what it means. And they say it's about the licence.

So if you think your definition is "the true meaning" of Open Source, you're wrong. It's not a different opinion. It's wrong. Wrong, like "banana is a vegetable" wrong.

Wrong.

I wouldn't have bothered to write about this, but it got my attention because his target is JBoss, and they have been spewing the same crap for years. ("Professional Open Source, a la JBoss/mySQL, to me is the real open source" — from Google cache, since poor old Marc Fleury had to purge his blog after the Red Hat acquisition.)

What bothers me about these "open source means my preferred development process" comments is not just that it's wrong — hey, everybody gets stuff wrong some of the time.

The problem is that it encourages stupidity in others. When people think there's more to "open source" than open source, they do stupid things, like try to get their toy project adopted by Apache (which is why their incubator application warns against "a fascination with the Apache brand"). Or they try to pretend they're something they're not — look at how Sun throws around the word "community" at pretty much anything they put on their web sites, even though said "community" invariably consists almost exclusively of developers employed by Sun). People just don't appreciate the difference between open source and (though it pains me to allude to anything to do with Eric "crazy" Raymond) cathedral-versus-bazaar development. I'm using a dozen or so different open source libraries in my current project. I don't give a damn about how they go about getting the job done. It's all open source, and I judge the code on its own merits.

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