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JBoss Madness

Stefan Tilkov,

I advised Matthias Bohnen, who is managing director of a company we have friendly relations with, against partnering with JBoss Inc. more than a year ago. In this case, I hate to have been right — but it seems that if your company advertises its JBoss consulting services without being a JBoss partner, you’re in for a surprise: they’ll come after you suing you for trademark violations!

Obviously, the guys there seem to have a rather strange view on what open source, and more importantly, free software is about (after all, JBoss’s source code is published under the LGPL.) Find out more about the JBoss issue here .

On October 10, 2005 12:08 PM, angryman said:

You’re mistaken, this practice is already condoned - enterprise Linux distros has been doing that for a while.

On October 10, 2005 1:06 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

I disagree that this is comparable — it would be if it were Linus Torvalds who sued people who offer “consulting for Linux” without his consent.

On October 11, 2005 7:43 AM, Miguel A Paraz said:

It must have something to do with the “Commercial Open Source” tagline. Defend your brand as your core property.

Interesting homepage - after a machine translation. :) Are you looking at the Geronimo-based SOA stack?

On October 11, 2005 11:49 PM, Stefan Tilkov said:

Miguel: Sorry about the missing English version, as 99% of our customer base speaks German, the company website is likely to remain in German for quite some time. No, we’re not currently looking at the Geronimo stack, but it’s likely to come up soon.