Marc Fluery, JBoss founder, chairman and CEO, has a new post that takes a dig at BEA and IBM for what he calls 'Strip Mining and Waste Dumping in Open Source'. "BEA and IBM are doing a good marketing job of spinning their "strategy". BEA calls it a "Blended" strategy....IBM calls it Bluewashing.
Marketing spin aside, the strategy is "OSS Strip Mining" which is taking open source software built by a community and "Bluewashing" or "Blending" within proprietary, closed source offerings; forking/changing the open source code as needed in the process. The community does not benefit from this, but IBM and BEA shareholders absolutely benefit.
A perfect example is IBM WebSphere Community Edition. It is based on the Apache Geronimo open source project and is "Bluewashed" whereby Geronimo is strip-mined for whatever is useful, then combined with other ingredients, etc. While the resulting product is sometimes free, it is no longer "open source" by any stretch of the imagination. This again is why competing commercial vendors prefer BSD-style licensing. It enables this “stealing” from the community, or in marketing-speak “leveraging”. At JBoss, we prefer FSF licenses, such as LGPL, that prevent the strip-mining while at the same time allowing end users and ISVs to reuse our code. Our users deserve the stability and comfort of knowing that the distribution of JBoss they are using is the same one that everyone else is running.
Another commercial software "strategy" is proprietary software "Waste Dumping". Think BEA with Beehive. This is the opposite of strip-mining in that it entails the commercial vendors "donating" some technology to open source..." Read on.
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