Making a Business out of Open Source

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. Fleury'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.Organiser(s): François Grey / IT department