CRN: What about IBM's letter from Rod Smith calling for Sun to open-source Java that followed Raymond's' letter?
Fleury: The thing on IBM was, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was a political move. ... I thought it was political [backing] of an emotional and ignorant letter to purely [advance] corporate goals, which is IBM would like to be the controller of Java. I think it was just an emotional point. I haven't read an argument that this would be good for everyone involved in any convincing way. The only thing that could evolve better in the Java virtual machine world is, yeah, we would have an open-source implementation now. The specs would still remain with the JCP and Sun, and the JCP so far is not that bad. It's pretty good and pretty open. The living proof is that guys like us are writing [the Enterprise Javabeans] EJB 3.0 [specification] with Sun. As far as the industry goes, it's very open, and specifically for the virtual machine layers, I don't see that it's broken.
We have fought for open-source implementations. We have never fought for taking the standards process out into the open-source [community] because I'm not sure it would work. Coming from the professional open-source community, we see the value of communities, of large groups of people collaborating. And certainly this is present in the JCP. Also, we see the value of one company being responsible at the end of the day. It's a very reassuring message of the benevolent dictator, and Sun certainly has an excellent track record as the benevolent dictator of Java for the industry. They have put together a multi-billion dollar industry with their partners. The value of that mix of a control point with large communities is definitely a dynamic at play with open source, and we are advocates of that in professional open source, which is not this [idea] of nobody is responsible in open source--because that only serves IBM, because they are the biggest [player].
CRN: It's funny to hear you say these things because only about a year ago JBoss and Sun were having a serious public fight over J2EE licensing, and you said some negative things about Sun.
Fleury: It's true, and you know ... some people talk about whiplash, and things like that. Definitely on the surface of things we have changed our tune. But what we were fighting for, which we got, was the rights to license and [develop] an open source implementation [of J2EE], which was not available to us before. It was just not possible. So Sun delivered on that front, and then I don't have a problem with the rest. I'm not calling for everything open source ... This is a real industry. I'm not calling for status quo, but in fact, there's no status quo. [The Java community] is moving well, our participation as federated and professionalized open-source communities within the JCP is a big sign of health and strength of that community. So far, so good. Definitely there is a friendly message between Sun and us, but it's not like we've changed our views on things. We've always called for an open sourcing of the implementation. We got that, and we're done.
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