BEA Chief Downplays Open-Source Alternatives
I think the marketplace so wants to believe there's a transition that everything is going to become open source. They are believing in something that really doesn't exist. Will JBoss work? I think yes. Only if the J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition] APIs become obsolete. If they become a commodity and nobody programs to J2EE anymore, then people will use JBoss. Because then you can pop JBoss and put it on WebLogic on the fly. We're not there yet. JBoss is not Linux, and Linux is not free.Call me dense, but I don't understand a single word of this. While puzzling over it, I also realized that I don't particularly care: whever Alfred Chuang thinks is unique about the app server, middleware, or portal space, it probably isn't unique enough to be shielded from the slow commoditizing forces of free and open source software.
Eventually enough people will have a need for unrestricted software to perform the same functions that IBM's WebSphere and BEA's WebLogic perform today. As soon as that core platform is stable enough for production use at scale, it's the beginning of the long goodbye for the proprietary solutions, with the weaker players disappearing first.
