JBoss Hit on Business Practices

Once again, JBoss Inc. has come into the limelight for alleged bad behavior and, in essence, not pursuing the open-source way, according to some.

In a blog entry posted recently, Rickard Oberg, founder of Senselogic Sweden AB, a software maker based in Orebro, Sweden, and former member of the JBoss team, accused JBoss of bad business practices, dirty tricks and even having an illegitimate license for the JBoss application server software.

In his post titled "The JBoss Issue," Oberg said: "It is with great sadness that it has come to my attention that JBoss Inc. has gone quite insane in how they conduct business. They have canceled the partnerships with a majority of the German service provider companies, sued at least one of them for using the JBoss name, and tried to acquire and use the customer list of said companies."

Indeed, Oberg accused JBoss of acting like a would-be monopolist. He said the Atlanta companys trademark strategy is "designed to create a monopoly situation whereby only JBoss Inc. and partners can offer such services, coupled with a pricing strategy that is quite aggressive and far from free."

A JBoss spokesperson said the company had no comment on the situation, except that the trademark issue has been "misrepresented."

Oberg also wrote an open letter to JBoss and company CEO Marc Fleury, asking that JBoss not abuse its trademark and copyright protections and to resolve alleged issues with the license.