Free of lock-in and open source — features that matter
by Karsten Wade
When JBoss Developer Studio was released, Darryl Taft, who writes an application development blog for eWeek.com, wondered, “Red Hat claims first place in the Eclipse open-source IDE stakes and I want to know why that makes a difference.” In the article, Darryl raises some difficult to understand points, such as equating the GPL to a lock-in license while misunderstanding the licensing of the plugins open sourced by Red Hat.
In trying to understand Darryl’s logic, I have read and re-read his short article. It leaves me with the question, does Darryl understand what open source is compared to closed source/proprietary software?
That might seem like a silly question on the face of it, but in the article there are several points where it is not clear what century the author is writing from.
Here is the main alarm-bell paragraph:
… Red Hat may have open-sourced the technology, but they did so under the GPL (General Public License) which means that it cannot be shared with anyone else in the Eclipse ecosystem. So the net effect is pretty much equivalent to making it proprietary?(sic)
This is factually incorrect and falacious disinformation about the GPL. The fact is, the plugins are released under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). You can download the plugins and see for yourself. That resolves any interoperability questions.
Regardless of which GPL license chosen, Red Hat’s strategy is to fully open source code so that it can be shared with anyone. That’s what the LGPL and GPL provide, guaranteed sharing. Other Eclipse vendors choose to pursue a legacy software licensing practice that locks them out from the full features of the open source community while locking-in their customer developers.
The LGPL/GPL are both excellent licenses for developer tools. You get to work with a codebase that is innovative and cannot disappear at the whim of the market or vendor. There are other open source licenses to choose from, which have been great at spurring adoption of open source by proprietary vendors. The LGPL/GPL provide full freedom forever.
The LGPL/GPL have arguably done more than any other licenses for the quality and quantity of open source solutions developers can choose from. Using the LGPL/GPL is the opposite of proprietary vendor lock-in. To argue otherwise is disingenuous.
Here’s another confusing paragraph comparing an orange to a bushel of apples:
… though Red Hat touts its “open sourceness,” its new offering goes for an annual subscription of $99. You can get Genuitec’s MyEclipse for 30 bucks annually and the professional edition of the product for about $50.
So, there are still people who think that open source means “no cost to me”? Sorry for everyone who missed the news, but we resolved that question by 2000. Open source’s main value is not in the low or no-cost, but in the quality of the software and the value of a truly open solution that provides developers with full freedom to innovate.
Red Hat has a very successful business selling subscriptions to provide support and services, and that is what the $99 gets a developer. For those who don’t want or need the subscription benefits, the open source bits are 100% freely available as JBoss Tools. The subscription fee gets a developer a supported set of packages, organized and ready for install. Anyone is welcome to put together their own set of packages (and support them as they see fit), but Red Hat won’t support those bits. Thankfully, there is the excellent JBoss.org community to help people who choose to use the no-fee JBoss Tools. No matter what you choose, you cannot lose.
Do other Eclipse solutions provide a subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (or any other OS)? An entire supported distribution is included in JBoss Developer Studio, along with many other subscription features (Hibernate, Seam, JBoss Application Server, and so forth.)
That is the bottom line on why JBoss Developer Studio is important. It does not lock developers into a proprietary solution with no way out. It gives to the community a set of very useful tools, otherwise freely available, and wraps the whole package with world-class support and services.