Another Blow to Open Source?

Oracle is in the process of buying JBoss. JBoss primarily develops a high end, open source J2EE server--a key component in enterprise computing and in deploying web services--that competes with BEA's WebLogic, IBM's WebSphere, and Oracle's Application Server, among others. I believe JBoss is the most popular of these competing servers. And I think Blogger runs on JBoss.

This is another blow to the open source domain. Just a few months ago, Oracle purchased InnoDB which produced questions about the future of the popular open source database MySQL. As with that purchase, the terms are not clear. Will JBoss continue to be an open source application, just owned and primarily managed by Oracle? Or will Oracle bring JBoss under its big umbrella and cannibalize it for their own commercial product?

The existing code for JBoss is still out there. I'm not sure what the law here is. The code, while open source, is owned by JBoss. As I understand the laws, this means that anyone can download the code and make whatever changes they want for their own use. But official changes, i.e. those with the JBoss brand, can only come from JBoss itself. A developer can submit his or her changes, but JBoss has to decide if they want to incorporate them or not. Consequently, if JBoss were a part of Oracle, I don't think there would be anyway to manage the code changes to the open source code base because the managing authority would be out of the picture. So, the last open source release of JBoss would be out there for all to use, but there would be no organized way to continue developing the application.

That would likely be the purpose of the acquisition. They wouldn't be able to kill JBoss outright, but they would be able to essentially starve it to death by killing future development of the system. Customers, rather than sticking with outdated and unsupported code, would go to competing products, including Oracle's.

My response to that would be Geronimo! No, not jumping out of an airplane. I mean Apache's open source J2EE server, Geronimo.