Mailing the story:

Marc Fleury is shocked--shocked!--that IBM would use the same tactics to attack him that he's been using to attack IBM. "Frankly, it leaves us scratching our heads," he says. For the past two years Fleury's company, Atlanta, Ga.-based JBoss, has been stealing business from IBM by giving away a set of open source programs that do the same work as IBM's WebSphere software. Fleury claims JBoss shipped more copies last year than IBM did. IBM apparently has grown tired of having a freebie program eating away at its sales. So now it is going nuclear. In May the computer giant acquired JBoss's main rival, Gluecode, which also distributes a set of open source Web server programs.