(June 17, 2003) - Lately Sun and The JBoss Group have been rather publicly sparring over the use of the J2EE brand, culminating in quite a bit of heat (and little light) in the press and in the blogosphere. It's been something I've watched for a while, because this kind of schism can be very bad for Java, and right now, Java's my bread and butter. I've been spending some time trying to figure out what the root causes are, and how to potentially fix things.
I've not gotten very far. However, I think I understand more of the reasoning behind both sides: it's a culture conflict, between two very different profit models.
The issue isn't profit itself: it's survival for both entities. Sun has regular employees and stockholders to support via products and support (and license models). As a commercial company, Sun simply has to leverage everything they can. Anything else would result in a bunch of hackers lounging around a coffee table (ironically enough, eh?) reminiscing about the good old days when Sun used to exist. The JBoss Group, similarly, has employees to support and encourage. It, too, needs to leverage everything at its disposal to make itself worth spending money on, except it doesn't have a core product, per se, besides support. Thus, it has to make its product worth enough such that clients need support.
There's nothing wrong with either model. However, put together, there's a huge culture war, because the licensing model cuts the support model off at the knees.
Sun makes money from J2EE in four primary ways that I know of, in no particular order:
1. Yearly licenses to use the brand (and receive the CTK). The licenses are based, in part, on a percentage of a vendor's J2EE sales.
2. Sales of products such as SunONE that use the J2EE brand within Sun.
3. Consultant-based support of J2EE technologies.
4. Hardware sales based on application server vendor recommendations (which are not very germane to this topic.)
While I'm certainly not directly involved, my impression is that the JBoss Group has asked Sun for a license based on the brand itself, which is normally a fairly hefty amount. The reasoning, of course, is that JBoss is an open source project, with deployable units free for download, and thus has no sales to represent it. (This sounds like some Microsoft FUD from a few years ago: MS said that Windows outsold Linux by an amazing amount, leaving out the fact that Linux was installable without a recorded sale.) As JBoss, the application server, has no product sales to generate revenue, and has no real owner (although the name is trademarked by Marc Fleury), the project simply does not have the fee structure required to support the J2EE brand. The JBoss Group, as I understand it, is acting as a proxy for the application server in this case to acquire the brand, much as UNIFIX acted as a proxy for Linux in order to test POSIX compliance.
Sun's business model (the part of it addressed here) is based on sales of J2EE products, and license fees generated from those sales. Thus, Sun needs to encourage vendors to sell application servers for as much money as the market will bear, to enhance its license fees. Market competition and the difficulty required to support the brand help to lower the license fee, but the brand identification, in a perfect world, carries with it high customer confidence in the J2EE name.
Sun is apparently willing to work with The JBoss Group on the license fee, but it's normally a yearly fee based on product sales… and JBoss as a product has no sales. If Sun grants JBoss a license, then the royalty fee becomes incredibly unfair to commercial vendors who do base their profits on product sales, effectively cutting off J2EE's profit model in perpetuity. This would force the entire industry into JBoss' profit model, one based solely on support. From Sun's perspective, The JBoss Group is asking Sun to commit suicide. Understandably, Sun is resisting the urge.
The JBoss Group, on the other hand, can't adapt legitimately to Sun's business model. Their business model is predicated on support of a product easily acquired by customers; if JBoss itself were not free, the support model wouldn't work as well. In addition, it wouldn't be as much fun, because they're in an admirable position of having great freedom; supporting a paid-for product has different requirements than support for an open source product. For them, JBoss needs the J2EE brand (sort of) because it's another thing that attracts customers, but purchasing the J2EE brand makes demands on them that their business model does not (and should not) support.
The open nature of JBoss' source, also, factors into branding. If the JBoss Group owns the license and donates it to the JBoss project (which is not a legal entity, to my knowledge), the CTK would have to remain in the ownership of the JBoss Group, who would also have to remain responsible for passing it. The CTK's importance in all this cannot be understated. It defines what a J2EE server must be able to do, and under which circumstances. This is a valuable investment, one that all of the J2EE-branded vendors have purchased; giving it to one representative of a given application server would be highly unfair to the other vendors, and would undercut Sun's profit model drastically. In addition, it grants ownership to The JBoss Group. This may be less of a barrier than it seems: JBoss, like most open source projects, has a manager of sorts controlling what goes in and what does not - but this definitely would center power in the hands of the CTK owners, as they'd be able to refuse patches based on the CTK, but wouldn't be able to hand the complete test back to a contributing developer.
The conflict, then, exists because Sun has different mechanisms of generating profit than the JBoss Group does. Sun sells products and licenses. The JBoss Group sells services based on products that need the licenses, needing the J2EE brand in order to identify itself to its core users (despite a declaration earlier this year from them that they "don't need J2EE"), and Sun can't give it to them in such a way that both groups can coexist ideally. At best, it would always be an uneasy truce, and neither side has shown itself comfortable with that.
