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JBoss Group Developers Walk Out
An anonymous reader writes "According to The Inquirer, 'seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network.'"
This seven person exodus doesn't exactly sound like the most open or fair thing to do to The JBoss Group. But, maybe I'm wrong ...
-- DossyDossy's Blog
Unless of course, you take good care of them and allow each of them to have a little room to grow and a little bit of sun.....
You see, most people would put up with a job that's demanding and requires long hours IF it was rewarding in some way (money helps, but it's not the whole picture)....the sheer venom that I read in that article means they were mad....they wanted to hurt JBoss group as much as they felt they were wronged....
I suspect that the pressure has been building for some time, this isn't just a "..hey, lets form our own business!" daydream.
As a former enterprise software Sun employee,
I wish the Core guys well. They do good work.
One question though: what about the business?
An lot goes into hiring enterprise consulting,
beyond good coding skills-- think of accounting,
insurance, scheduling, dedicated team reps, etc.
More importantly, my number one consideration
was trustworthiness-- including dependability--
so a mass walkout seems like a difficult launch.
Cheers, Joel
The article was big on dramatic narration at the expense of explaining what's really going on...
Why did these guys do it? Did they decide they'd have more fun at their own company? You'd think, with a move like this, they'd have serious grievences with JBoss Group. Either that or they're being backstabing bastards. I'll assume the first...
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
Those who use Java for anything that requires an app server realize this is a signicant post. JBoss is one of the best open source app servers available. Basically, if you use Java, you understand the point. This isn't to say that Java is the best, or that everything else sux, but if you are interested in programming, Java should be on your radar - last I checked, programming and programming languages are a relevant "nerd" topic. If a significant Perl/C tool was affected this way, I doubt there would be any questions as to the validity or significance of this story.
ymmv
All they are doing is starting their own company in order to make money supporting JBoss and a few other techs. Just like anyone else could. The only difference is that these guys actually have a lot of credibility around jboss, and hence someone might actually hire them.
No real drama here.
My guess is it doesn't - I don't know much about what JBoss group, but my guess is they do pretty much the same old EJB consulting for customers that everyone else does. Building yet another Customer object for yet another client. Not the sort of thing that requires the world's greatest experts in transaction management, object persistence, etc. etc.
Well, no. They have their own high-performance OSS EJB container that is known for implementing standards quickly. There's something to be said for this.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
There's more name dropping in that timeline article than I've ever read in my life... Winamp, Code Poet t-shirt, Nirvana, Nintendo Advance etc... what are they trying to say? That they're cool? Are these brand names supposed to make me associate them with somebody special? Are they Java-coding rebels?
Ok, I'm half kidding, but the article is hardly newsworthy or even understandable to me.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Not only because they have a pretty website but also because of this:
Please look for us at JavaOneâ booth 1705!
You don't just whip up a booth & promo material in a weekend (as someone who has worked booths I know it's a royal pain). This year I'm attending JavaOne as a developer...I'll definitely be stopping by to see what they've got. No good swag I'm sure...they're probably too poor yet...
That journal did not say anything about their reason for leaving but you are definitely right on the point about their audacity to list "openness" on their site after what they did no matter what the cause.
I have been thinking (dont mock me...), and I was thinking if the name of the company who distributed a free appserver a la J2EE, but was little diffrent, not complient, did things little different, had som proprioty API's (Yeah, like Xerox AOP) was (the name of the corp remember?) was M$?? Hell would break lose. You (incl M$ lovers)tell me where my thinking went wrong...
The article says "The JBoss Group has been forked." The group, not the code.
The CDN web site puts a lot of emphasis on CVS commit access into various open source projects, include JBoss itself. This does not sound at all like a code fork.
Just last night I installed JBoss/Tomcat to kick it around and consider it for our possible future business.
I keep going back and forth about commercial suppport. I keep thinking "gee, in a business where business revenue relies on the server software perhaps we should go ahead and pay the big bucks for a commercial product with support." Then I realize I currently work in a large company that pays for commerical products and the vendor support reps are clueless and we have to eventually figure out the problems and fix them ourselves anyway. (Disclaimer: I'm a network admin, not a developer, so my vendor experiences are with implementation and operational issues.)
Okay, what about liability then? I've heard before that you want to feel there's someone to sue if something goes wrong. But who's ever sued Microsoft (or IBM, Sun, HP, BEA, Oracle) because of lost business revenue due to their products?
What do you really get from paying the big boys big money?
I have a sneaking suspicion I'd come out way ahead financially and operationally if I take the money I save on huge up-front licensing and ongoing per-seat licensing and split it between the business and a support fund, and if we run into a problem we can't handle it's time to hire one of the developers of the software to fix it for us, or in the case of JBoss use the Core Developer's consulting service.
If Fleury is smart, he'll keep them on the core commit team and wish them all the best with their venture, and quietly hire replacements -- there's plenty of good J2EE talent around. That makes him look like a mensch, scores community brownie points, helps the public image of OSS, and (the real reason) does nothing to frighten paying corporate clients away from The JBoss Group. If he does *anything* that looks like flinching about the loss of a few developers, corporations will flee to the waiting arms of BEA or IBM, because it will prove to them that the whole thing was a house of cards to start with.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
For most people, changing database happens once in a blue moon and multiple devices are pointless overkill, but everybody needs scalability and manageability.
That web site should have its internet connection stripped for publishing what might be the silliest goddamned story I've ever read. From the tone of it, you'd think these guys were parachuting into combat.
And the scarier part is that noone else seems to notice how pathetic it is.
As a coder who's been watching the EJBoss... I mean JBoss... code, since it didn't work, I'm completely confident this project will carry on. JBoss isn't going away. Even if all the core JBoss developers dropped off the face of the planet, there would be others to pick up the cause and offer support. This is a classic example of why OSS works and works well.
-- damon@sicore.org A929 9798 86F9 5AD7 7BD5 E6AD 37A2 DF9B 5EDD C02E http://www.sicore.org/publicKeys/damon.txt