"For the past two years [Marc] Fleury's company, Atlanta, Ga.-based JBoss, has been stealing business from IBM by giving away a set of open source programs that do the same work as IBM's WebSphere software. Fleury claims JBoss shipped more copies last year than IBM did. IBM apparently has grown tired of having a freebie program eating away at its sales. So now it is going nuclear," claims Forbes.
The story is that IBM has bought a JBoss rival, Gluecode, and is going to give the software away.
Fleury ... claims IBM is trying to put his privately held company out of business. He is furious, but also stunned: He says Gluecode could hurt sales of IBM's WebSphere as much as it hurts JBoss, yet IBM doesn't seem to care.
"Where does this all end? When the whole deck of cards, the whole software industry, falls apart? I find it arrogant on their part that they think they can control what they've unleashed," says Fleury, JBoss' chairman and chief executive.
Poor guy. Did he not get the memo? This is what open source software is all about: creating knockoffs and giving them away, destroying the value of whatever the other guy is selling.
[My emphasis.]
