The Australian-led Hibernate free software project has attracted financial backing from a US commercial vendor, in exchange for premium customer service. Gavin King and his colleague Christian Bauer have joined the payroll of JBoss Inc, a software infrastructure company based in Georgia, US. King says selling his expert knowledge of the project he founded 21/2 years ago, will help fund the project's ongoing development.
Hibernate automatically translates information contained in systems written in Java, into relational databases - while JBoss provides an "application server" platform to run them on.
"The JBoss company is trying to implement a model of professional open source," King says, "where open source developers can make projects and eat at the same time. A lot of open source projects are provided with no warranty, with no company standing behind it with response teams and 7x24 service or training. So Hibernate is now supported by JBoss, by me and Christian from the Hibernate team."
King says the company has already recouped the two developers' salaries in consulting fees.
However, this open source patronage model benefits the commercial software vendor in other ways too. JBoss actually incorporates Hibernate within its own product, so having its two lead programmers on board ensures tight integration. It also gives JBoss an introduction to its competitors' customers - Java programmers using IBM's WebSphere, BEA's Web Logic and Oracle's 9iAS application servers.
So by starting a successful open source project, King has effectively delivered JBoss an opening to thousands of Java application server users around the world. And now King gets a good night's sleep.
"Six months ago, I was in a difficult position with a day job," King says.
"I developed Hibernate at night. I'm a permanent employee of JBoss now. As the commercial aspect grows, we can hire more people to work on the open source full-time. When I was doing this by myself, I had no life. I didn't sleep. I had two jobs."
King says people look at Linux as the prime example and conclude open source development isn't innovative. But he argues operating systems are a commodity item anyway and there is a lot of other innovation in open source software that's under the media's radar. The patronage he now enjoys is perhaps a good way to fund open source research and development. Hibernate's code base has six main contributors but, as the product matures, with new features being added less frequently, King finds himself busier than ever on things other than coding.
"Most of the work in an open source project is not development but answering user questions and maintaining the website," he says.
"There are a lot of things to do that makes it a project, not a program, such as writing books, documentation, presenting at conferences and user groups."
Although the two lead contributors are now JBoss employees, all the Hibernate code is still subject to open source's perpetual free software licensing. This means anyone can take the source code for free and "fork" it into another open source project if they so desire.
But King believes professional support with the optional backing of a commercial vendor will help ensure his project's continuing success.
"I didn't envisage this as a project done purely for the intellectual enjoyment of it," he says.
"Right from the start I wanted to have a serious project for serious business applications. So right from the start we had good documentation, because that's often not the case with open source software. We don't want to be seen as a cheap solution. When you choose to use Hibernate, you choose to use something that's better than any commercial software. We love doing it but it's a product, not a hobby."
With this kind of attitude, serious open source developers might find serious patronage from commercial vendors hoping to attract open source users to their platforms.