How is JBOSS any different when they are being sold to ORACLE that has a closed source development environment at the heart of their toolkit? Other parts of the article make sense though about the 'freeby' mentality. The whole point of doing FOSS is more competition.

I like where ORACLE is going but I hope they FOSS everything that they give to consumers that is. I don't believe private software has to be open source, obviously like our personal information, maybe open source at an extreme private level.

I still like BSD as it caters to not having to open private stuff, I think, whereas the GPL would seem you have to be very tied to the initial app. I don't see stealing there if people don't let them wash away who the original inventor is.
The Mozilla license is similar and has done well. I have been impressed with the Dragonfly, PC, Desktop, and Net BSDs so far as sometimes the websites seem more organized then Linux’s. I haven’t looked at the BSD system yet but I heard it's a little more cleaner although not as free as Linux.

GNU is altruistic yes, but not benevolent because they do represent a 'godlike' example but hence where not God and I'm happy for that. They more lead by example.
I don't know if 'fair software or hardware' is too altruistic but more realistic; as only the GPL is the most altruistic because of it's high ideals. I like the GPL because it is the most simple environment to work in hence how Linux files/commands are all lowercase and shorthand but BSD/Mozilla is more focused and tighter in some aspects.
FSF will be that way sometimes. It's a great environment though to be unencumbered when writing software that you want to quickly evolve and to output allot of free quality content. For instance like if I made a large space world with it.
Free content is nice and we definitely need more of it with things like music and digital art under the Creative Commons but that is just the beginning as then you need to create something private with it. There is a certain time in the production cycle when your content is under no contract at all except total privacy weather it's GNU or not.

Not sure what you mean by "within [our] own sphere", but maybe this can shed some light...

Besides projects hosted at JBoss we contribute to:
* Apache Tomcat
* JacORB
* Apache Scout
* MyFaces
* Eclipse J2EE tooling

Marc has another blog coming down the pipe that explains in more detail how diverse our development community is. Don't want to spoil anything, til then ask your self this question: Who exactly benefits by painting us as "not in the spirit of open source" when our actions and hard work are usually quite the opposite?

Bill

P.S. You suck too! ;-)

Thanks Bill, I look forward to more info. I don't think that what you do is not in the spirit of open source, in fact I would argue that your open source spirit probably costs you a lot of sales, but is beneficial in the end. Sort of like how SugarCRM's biggest competitor is the free version.

I am a fan of JBoss as a business, maybe my struggle with the "sphere" is more related to communications outreach targeted at writers and bloggers.