gregw

Open source Closed Project

This is a repost of an old old blog entry that has become relevant again.

The JBoss™ image used has been contributed to the Open Source project and is available on sourceforge plus variations of it are distributed with JBoss releases. For several years, it has been used on the Jetty home page and also on the Jetty Powered page. Both link through to the JBoss™ project page on sourceforge.

Jetty is the default web tier of JBoss releases from 3.0 to 3.2.1 and continues to be the web container of choice for many JBoss users. While I no longer work with JBoss™ Group LLC, I am still very much supportive of the JBoss™ the OS project and continue to maintain the Jetty integration sar (as I am also supportive of Jetty in Geronimo, JOnAS, Avalon, etc...).

I don't expect JBoss™ Group LLC to hand out my new business cards for me, but I do expect an open source project to be administered on a non-discriminatory basis. Unfortunately the administration of JBoss is falling way short of that:

• My name and photo have been removed from the list of current and retired JBoss™ contributors. OK, so I'm still in the source and CVS log but an open source project should not take commercial alliances into consideration when deciding how much credit to give for contributions. At least the Wayback Machine remembers me.
• I have been censored out of the jboss-user and jboss-dev mailing lists, even when my posts are bug reports or answers to user questions. I have posted 2 training announcements to jboss-user, which I believe is appropriate usage for a list provided by sourceforge whose moderators frequently allow such announcements from a particular contributor. I certainly have not been trolling the jboss mailing lists like JBoss Group employees have trolled the Jetty lists.
• Now it is not OK for an open source project to graphically link to another open source project because of trademarcs held by an individual and licensed to a particular service provider.

I believe the jetty project has the moral and legal right to use that image. It is an open source image of a trademarc that has not been enforced, linking to a project that Jetty made significant contributions to and includes a fork of the Jetty code.

But rights aside, I do not want to go against the wishes of a copyright holder. So I have removed the image from the Mort Bay pages and will start the process of removing them from the next Jetty releases and thus from the jetty pages.

I have also responded to JBoss™ Group asking if Jetty could license the trademarc and asking what are the not-for-profit non-discriminatory licensing terms. So far the only response has been along the lines of: just take down the images or we will get legal on your arse. This is not good enough and I believe JBoss™ Group LLC owe the community a fair and open policy for the use of the name and image that they have contributed to. Something like a LinuxMark would be great.

JBoss and JBoss Group are a registered trademark and servicemark of Marc Fleury under operation by The JBoss Group, LLC. All similarity between the terms free speech and free beer is purely coincidental. No copyrights have been harmed in the writing of this blog. Individual outrage may vary.

Posted at 04:00PM Nov 26, 2003 by gregw in General  |  Comments[0]