As you have probably heard by now, Hunter S Thompson committed suicide last Sunday. If you don't know who HST is, well, he was the guy who invented "gonzo journalism" and more famously the author of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", an hilarious tale of drug binging in the 70's. If you haven't read it, go read it.

Today's International Herald Tribune wrote (my father sent me the quote from paper)

« Thomson’s approach in many ways mirrors the style of modern-day bloggers, those self-styled social commentators who blend news, opinion and personal experience on Internet postings. Like bloggers, Thomson built his case for the state of America around the framework of his personal views and opinions ».

Ironically his live-in guy was the boyfriend of my sister, a guy by the name of Ben Fee. Hunter liked ben and gave him a place to stay in Aspen, I believe it is because Ben doesn't do any drugs AT ALL. The kid doesn't even get smashed with us at christmas dinners. Even when 67 years old hunter would encourage him to drop acid with him he would pass. Amazing. I believe that Ben was so different from the people Hunter met that he probably took to liking him.

Apart from being my sister's boyfriend, Ben is also a talented snowboard videographer and is studying film in LA. Ben will be filming JBossWorld which is taking place in ATL next week. Essentially we want to do a "reality show" about JBW and have the camera come with me to interview people at the show in the meetings, on stage etc, it will be fun and since he has that dynamic camera from the snowboarding experience, we will make it available on the web.

But the real story, where JBW and Hunter come together, is that for JBoss World we wanted to interview Hunter on his thoughts about software and open source in particular. I wanted to include a quote from the guru in our introduction. I mean Open Source is about as 70's in spirit as it gets. Here is a field where the old idealism is alive if not thriving, it ain't exactly sex, drugs and rock roll, but it is pretty close :)

We rant about and believe in communities, brotherly love and hatred, promiscuous sex through code, and that tomorrow will be a better world because of what we are doing. The old delusional "making an impact on the world" is alive and well, and a lot of it right here at JBoss. Really I just wanted to meet The Man.

So Ben went to ask Hunter if he would do the interview, apparently he replied "I don't give fuck all about software" and then committed suicide.

So close and yet so far, see many of you next week in Atlanta,

Remember we love you.

marcf

In this article James Gosling bashes us (OSS vendors) by basically saying that

"There are all these open source groups that have to figure out what their economic model is," Gosling told Computerworld. "Everyone that works on these open source projects [must] pay rent and buy lunch...so where does that money come from? Open source vendors also came under fire, with Gosling sideswiping MySQL, JBoss, and Red Hat: "They say that they are running their businesses based on services. "These businesses are more hype than reality. If they don't have a [longer term] economic model...they are going to have a really hard time."

Since I am an absolute fan of mr gosling, I take the criticism to heart. I just want to reassure him that our models are financially viable. The first dirty little secret of OSS models is that we keep the scalable part of the enterprise model intact, namely we are software vendors that focus on the maintenance part of the business and give the software away for free. It is financially sound in our case. If you look at RH growth since they went public you will see that with constant net new business (null second derivative == they don't accelerate their sales) they are capable of scaling because of a 65% renewal rate year to year. Subscription based revenue streams are nice because they are very predictable in their half life. Wall Street is warming up to that model and understands that you don't value the companies on P/E but rather free cash flow. It scales. JBoss for example was always cash flow positive, meaning that more money comes in that goes out and we haven't touched the VC money we raised a year ago. Basically we have grown on the cash generated by operations. Few startups can say the same in the traditional enterprise model.

I presume that Mr Gosling mistakes services businesses, which scale linearly with people (bad) with OSS services businesses which scale geometrically with people, as the traditional software businesses do (good). In other words, we pay for our rents, we pay for our kids through school. The model works and we are bringing it to other regions of software.

marcf