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Delivering Quality to the Enterprise
Marc Fleury discusses JBoss's approach to open source as a development and delivery methodology that seeks to reshape the middleware market
by Kay Keppler

June 27, 2005

JBoss provides support to customers of its open source Java products, and through its Professional Open Source model is seeking to revolutionize how middleware software in the enterprise is built, distributed, and supported. Before starting the JBoss project in 1999, Marc Fleury, Ph.D., founder, chairman, and CEO of JBoss, worked for Sun Microsystems France and then in the United States.

Fleury discussed the state of open source, JBoss's philosophy, and its support of Java-based products with Java Pro Editor, Kay Keppler. In this exclusive interview, Fleury talked about JBoss, its Professional Open Source model and how it promotes the governance of open source in the application infrastructure, adoption trends in commercial enterprises, licensing and indemnification, ensuring the availability of enterprise Java resources without complexity, and other topics. Fleury will also be a key speaker at Java Pro Live! in San Diego, California, in September (see Resources).

Java Pro: What is your elevator pitch? How would you explain to a company why your approach is superior to a vendor with a commercial product?

Marc Fleury: JBoss is a second-generation open source company. By that, I mean that we are a true software publisher, not a third-party packager of free software that others have developed. Every open source technology we support is developed, for the most part, by JBoss. That's true for the JBoss Application Server, the Hibernate object/relational mapping solution, JBoss jBPM workflow engine, and even the Apache Tomcat Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages Web container.

Today, JBoss has about a dozen projects that can be used independently, if developers choose, or together as a framework that dramatically simplifies the process of building and delivering enterprise Java-based applications and services. Our platform is called the JBoss Enterprise Middleware System, or JEMS. (See the sidebar, "JBoss Enterprise Middleware System" for more information on this product suite.)

JBoss provides the resources, technology direction, core development, and high-quality services behind JEMS and all of its associated open source projects. We've been able to provide strong and sustained support for the projects, such as the JBoss Application Server, Hibernate, and Apache Tomcat, helping them become market leaders in their respective domains. (For more information about these and other JBoss products, see Resources for these corresponding sidebar articles, "JBoss Application Server," "Hibernate," and "JBoss Portal.")