Fleury: I'm talking about the implementation. The implementation is gone. So the rug was pulled out from under our feet, basically. So I question the licensing model there, which is middleware-vendor friendly. And there are very few of us [middleware vendors]--there's JBoss, BEA and IBM. It's quite friendly to us. Essentially, I could do the same to Axis, because that's friendly to me, as a vendor. But how is that friendly to end-users and end-users of that project, and how is that friendly to developers? It's wrong in my mind.
CRN: You're afraid that might happen with Java if it were open source.
Fleury: The bigger guy could just come in, steal your wares and run. That's the problem with the licensing and the fact that there is no company. Apache, it's a Web site. It's a nonprofit organization. You're not doing deals with someone; you're doing deals with a Web site, to some degree. There is the Apache Software Foundation as a nonprofit and I'm really cool with that. That's a success. But is it the right structure for something as critical for infrastructure? I simply don't know. What Apache does well is a lot of little projects, utility tools, definitely the parcers are great, Tomcat. But we are the leading sponsors of Tomcat today. ... To sustain that model means commitment from us. It's not self-sustained. It depends on contributions and charity. I don't think it's the appropriate model for professional open source.
CRN:: So ultimately, you think there has to be a vested financial interest in open source for it to be successful in the IT industry.
Fleury: I want to answer this very specifically. There are many models of open source. There's the nonprofit open source and Apache is a success in that respect, in the nonprofit sphere. But then Linux [vendors] MySQL and JBoss are for-profit, and we believe strongly in the professional open-source model, this new generation of companies--emphasis on companies--that have not just embraced open source, but were born out of open source. We claim we are the future of open source, in a sense.
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