eWeek: Open-Source Growing Pains Give Sun Aches

“Late last year Sun amended its Java Community Process (JCP)
program to accommodate demands of the open-source community and
enable organizations to license the Java 2 Enterprise Edition
(J2EE) compatibility test suite without licensing the source code,
which was formerly the case. But the Atlanta-based JBoss Group LLC,
the first organization to which Sun has offered the new amended
licensing, is crying foul.

“Rick Scaletta, group manager of J2EE licensing at Sun,
acknowledged that Sun so far has only offered the revised licensing
scheme to JBoss–for licensing the compatibility test suite for the
upcoming next version of J2EE, known as J2EE 1.4. However, JBoss is
balking at the deal, and Sun is making noise about it. The JBoss
Group develops and maintains the open-source JBoss Java application
server.

“However, observers say the overall issue is bigger than Sun and
JBoss and is more an issue of what happens when an open-source
application grows up and developers begin trying to comercialize a
technology. At an open-source conference in Washington last week,
Jason Matusow, program manager for Microsoft Corp.’s Shared Source
Initiative, said that in his view, open-source software vendors are
largely looking to commercialize open-source software in some way.
And Microsoft makes no bones about it: the company will not soon
support open-source software but will coexist with it…”

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