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