(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.
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