Linux in Government: Providing a Successful Model for OSS Enterprise Users and Linux Companies

Not too many years ago, I had an encounter with a subordinate who reported
to me and another manager. I considered the event unpleasant, worthy of
dismissal, so I met with the other boss to discuss it. During that
discussion ,the question of coachability came up. We reached a consensus that perhaps
we lacked the ability to coach our subordinate. We later met with the
young man and asked him what it would take for us to coach him. Knowing
his job sat on the bubble, the young man at first professed an eagerness
for coaching but then finally admitted no one could coach him. He said
that he was not coachable. At that moment, I knew the opposite was true,
and over time he became an excellent manager himself.

Allowing oneself to become coachable requires what I sometimes call
an existential moment of courage. It requires an ability to allow
someone else to reach us with our defenses down and to admit we do not
know something. It also requires a high degree of self confidence and
knowledge that we need to have the same courage and vulnerability each time
our need for coaching surfaces.

Bob Dylan once wrote, "he not busy being born/Is busy dying". Most people
interpret that to mean the when we stop growing and learning, we start the
final journey of our lives.

People who reach a certain level of competency in any field often forget
that learning and growing continue to be requirements for excelling. For
that reason, we all need to find strong models of success to emulate.
The most successful man I ever met told me that he spent every moment
he could studying the lives of great men. That man once served as the
Chief of Staff to Dwight D. Eisenhower.

In the emerging industry we call open source, finding people to emulate
does not come easily. One company in particular, however, has demonstrated a
successful commercial model, about which few Linux people know and fewer
understand. When I mention the name
JBoss, I'm surprised by how few
Linux advocates and government CIOs have much awareness of the project
or the company.

On Freshmeat,
you can find this description of JBoss:

JBoss is an Open Source, standards-compliant, Enterprise JavaBeans
application server implemented in pure Java. JBoss provides JBossServer,
the basic EJB container and JMX infrastructure, JBossMQ for JMS messaging,
JBossMail for mail, JBossTX for JTA/JTS transactions, JBossSX for
JAAS based security, JBossCX for JCA connectivity, and JBossCMP for
CMP persistence. It integrates with Tomcat Servlet/JSP container and
Jetty Web server/servlet container, and enables you to mix and match
these components through JMX by replacing any component you wish with a
JMX-compliant implementation for the same APIs. The goal is to provide
a full J2EE stack in the Free/Open Source software world.

This description tells us little, though, about a company that now owns
the market in which IBM's Websphere and BEA's WebLogic once fought each
other for control of the J2EE application server space. How did an open-source company
that gives away its product with an LGPL license and that allows developers
to bundle, include and redistribute freely its software in their own
products become the industry bell-weather? In answering that question,
you basically answer what everyone has been asking open-source software:
How do you make money with a straight Free Software license?
Evolution of an Enterprise Open-Source Company
Figure 1 provides a visual depiction of JBoss's growth. Last summer,
I conducted an interview with the founder of JBoss, Marc Fleury. I learned that as with
most open-source advocates, he started the company in a garage, set up
a project, attracted like-minded developers and strove toward building
and releasing working software.
Figure 1. Courtesy of Shaun Connolly,
JBoss
Unlike other open-source projects, however, Fleury began generating revenue by
offering training and personal support. He worked to train developers
to use his product and answered their questions when they ran into
trouble. While providing an income for himself, he also established
a community of interest that ultimately blossomed into a robust
Open Source community.

Fleury's initial activities as a small consultancy may provide the point
of delineation between JBoss and other similar ventures. In fact, my own success
in business occurred when I began offering training, seminars and a lot
of content about my products, waiting patiently for the business
to develop.

Fleury solved the problem that we often hear about open-source companies
and projects: He provided people with clear information on how to use
the software and always was ready to help. Contrast that with projects
in which you're expected to find information from mailing lists or
forums--the same forums in which you are blasted for asking questions
already answered in a previous thread.
Open-Source Challenges for Enterprises
The vast majority of open-source projects have significant challenges
that have caused commercial vendors to shy away from them. In speaking
with open-source leads at Apple Computer, HP and IBM, each sited the
inability to find someone at open-source projects with whom to interface
as the biggest business problem. The simple fact is, business people need
other business people with whom they can interface.

And, that's only the start. Distributions such as Red Hat, SUSE and Mandrake
have similar concerns when it comes to working with open-source
projects. That's why some famous projects do not make it into these
distributions. A cross section of concerns people have mentioned to me
include a lack of:

• adequate support and maintenance
• continued innovation
• visibility/certainty around product road
  maps
• functionality/ease of use for IT managers, particularly
  across enterprise size environments
• stable business models to fund new development and
  expand into new product areas
• structured and scalable partner ecosystems devoted to
  enabling customer success

Additional concerns include projects becoming stale and misunderstandings
and worries over intellectual property risks.

If you use the model that has evolved around JBoss, you should find that it
contains normal open-source aspects, such as free licenses (under
LGPL), source code, enterprise-quality software, observable quality
assurance processes and a robust community. You also can find extended
business offerings, including training, professional sales and support
(24x7x365), indemnification, product roadmaps and management and quality
documentation. Therefore, JBoss has become a staple at places such as
Apple Computer and HP.
OSMM
In Bernard Golden's book, Succeeding with Open
Source, he talks about something he calls an "Open Source
Maturity Model". In his model he provides criteria for scoring mature
organizations; they are software, support, documentation, training, integration and professional services. According
to this model, those companies that provide adequate functionality in
each of these areas can be scored according to the model. In
this
article, Golden rates JBoss and provides an overview of the Open Source Maturity
Model. He calls his model a product-independent methodology that
architects/developers can use to assess the suitability of a wide range
of Open Source offerings.

I applied Golden's criteria to several successful open-source projects,
including the OpenOffice.org project, GNOME and Mozilla, and found them
lacking in the six criteria. I also compared them to some Linux desktop
distributions and found them equally lacking. Considering this, it does
not surprise me, for example, that the Linux desktop has had some
difficulty breaching the enterprise desktop.

I have one major disagreement with Golden's six criteria, however. I believe
it should include the quality and quantity of an open-source project's
community. Without community support, no open-source project can succeed.
Additional Observations
From an enterprise perspective, Golden makes a lot of sense. JBoss does
stand out as a strong business, one on which one might want to model her
or her own business. One even would recommend it to venture capitalists,
who made so many mistakes with open-source investments.

And although JBoss embodies the quintessential open-source model, we
cannot ignore Red Hat, which also adequately covers the six criteria
presented in Golden's model. One difference does exist, here, though.
If Red Hat does not feel it can do an adequate job at something, the
company refrains from offering it as a supported product.

In addition, we might want to use some caution when providing Golden an
honorary knighthood. Some IT managers, enterprises and others may consider
Doc Searl's
Do-It-Yourself IT (DIY
IT) theory to be a more inviting concept. In Doc's
model, the consumer becomes the provider, and in many organizations that's
adequate. In fact, for many businesses, one could not provide the resources
needed to build these businesses if he or she solely followed the Open Source
Maturity Model.
Final Notes
I have a high regard for JBoss and wish more open-source companies would
follow the JBoss business plan. I also have the highest regard for new
and unfunded projects that start off like Fleury's EJB-OSS did,
back in 1999. We can applaud the people who joined Fleury and made JBoss wildly
successful. We also should applaud everyone who reaches out in an attempt
to realize his or her own dreams and aspirations. Along the way, I hope
these people become coachable and look for successful models to emulate.
Resources
"DIY-IT: How Linux
and Open Source Are Bringing Do-It-Yourself to Information
Technology"

"How Linux Makes
Companies Smarter"

Tom Adelstein lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, Yvonne, and
works as a Linux and open-source software consultant with Hiser+Adelstein,
headquartered in New York City. He's the co-author of the book
Exploring the JDS Linux Desktop and author of an
upcoming book on Linux system administration, to be published by O'Reilly
and Associates. Tom has been writing articles and books about Linux since
early 1999.