Marc Fleury, Founder of JBoss, will present about “Making a Business out of Open Source” at the CERN this coming Monday. This guy is quite a funny and disruptive character (he once referred to the Apache crowd as a bunch of fat ladies drinking tea among other things) who built a company despite heavy skepticism about open source in the early days of the movement.

I really wish I could be there on Monday but I will still be in Seoul. Anyway, feel free to contact François Grey on francois.grey@cern.ch if you wish to attend (free).

Practical details below:

Speaker: Marc Fleury, Founder of JBoss

Topic: Making a Business out of Open Source

Time and Place: Monday 16th April 14:00-15:00, CERN Council Chamber

Abstract: Marc Fleury, a physicist by training, retired in his thirties after selling the company JBoss, which made an open-source application server, to Red Hat. He will talk about the various business models of open source software. From leveraging available open source software and casual contributions, to on-ramp models and subscription models, various business models have been explored and function. Not all models work for all software fields and business types. He will review those business models in context and survey “state-of-the-art” economic models for open source software production.

Speaker Bio: Marc Fleury is the creator of JBoss, an open-source Java application server.
Fleury holds a degree in mathematics and a Doctorate in physics from the École Polytechnique in Paris and a Master in Theoretical Physics from the École Normale. He worked in France for Sun Microsystems before moving to the United States where he has worked on various Java projects. Marc’s research interest focused on middleware, and he started the JBoss project in 1999, and went on to found the JBoss company with his wife Nathalie. JBoss became a corporation under the name JBoss, Inc. in 2004. After selling his company to Red Hat in 2006, Fleury became Senior Vice President and General Manager of the JBoss Division. On 9 February 2007, his departure from Red Hat was made public. He is currently pursuing other personal interests, such as teaching, research in biology, his family, and doing gigs as a techno DJ in the Atlanta area.

Bonus link: a very interesting 2005 interview of Fleury where he gives a hard look at the open source market.

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