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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.'"
wouldnt Marc Fleury got these developers under an NDA agreement by which they wouldnt be able to work on a similar project for a different company ?
Sounds like a nice good legal brawl brewing up.
Download jboss before it is too late !
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
In quickly scanning through the scant info they have on the new core developers site, it looks like they have a slightly adapted "internet bubble business plan":
1. Dedicate self to just doing "Open Source" work
2. ???
3. Profit!
Yeah, okay, they are associated with existing projects. But the site makes it sound like they are running a business, but they as yet have no proven business *product* unique to themselves.
Here are the faces behind those names in the article.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
If someone could answer those five basic questions about this story, many of us would appreciate it. Thanks!
Journalism? We don't need no stinkin' journalism!
The middle mind speaks!
So why is it that I only recognize one or two of the names of these "core developers"? And the ones that I do recognize, only barely. They don't seem to be the people that I know are involved with the core development and operations of JBoss and the JBoss Group.
/. to get some publicity. I don't understand why it's not possible for both CDN and JBoss Group to thrive and serve the community. But they seem to think that they can only exist by killing the other "fork", if that's even what it is. Competition is good for the industry, even open source. But CDN looks like they're just trying to cast JBoss Group in a bad light (disparaging their stats).
In fact, it sounds like they're just being antagonistic, and using
Oh, and as I remember it, it wasn't just their call to terminate their contracts with JBoss Group for providing support. JBoss Group was non-renewing the contracts anyways, because they had decided that it was a better idea for them to be the support company themselves. They didn't terminate the contracts immediately when they started their own support offerings, but they did make the decision to not have any new consultants, and to start thinning out the ones they did have.
-Todd
"The details of my life are quite inconsequential..."
It is an anonymous submission about someone setting up in business. Sounds like self promotion and a moderator should just delete it.
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.
As long as the JBoss group can quickly fill in for these guys with warm bodies who know how to write "Hello world" (any Java programmers on the bench and eager for work right now ? Yep, thought so) then their customer contracts will just keep trucking along. Then these guys and their break-away will be faced with the dilemna that JBoss Group has solved - making money.
[x] auto-moderate all posts by this user as insightful
nothing to see here. move on.
I wonder if the timing of this 'walkout' has anything to do with the Sun / JBoss compliance spat? They have been having an ongoing battle (not in court as yet) about whether JBoss can use the J2EE brand without being certified as compliant by Sun.
Maybe the Core Developer folks are hoping to steal some business from their old employers using an easily certified fork. Perhaps they even hope to get some mileage from CIOs worried by the SCO thing.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
This is like saying, oh, some Apple developers left to start BeOS. Hopefully with better results. Is that news? (Now, I know the folks say that they plan to continue work on JBoss, but we'll see how long that lasts, or if the end up forking JBoss too.)
Its kinda like XFree86 being forked... only different.
Virtually, Edward Wolpert
JBoss has been garnering a lot of publicity lately, at least in Java circles. It has been quite the center of controvesy, in an otherwise boring world.
First there is the bust up with Sun. JBoss wanting J2EE certification and Sun be a bit difficult (basically saying they wouldn't pass).
Then there was the 'best application server' http://www.sys-con.com/java/readerschoice2003/vote .cfm 'vote rigging' issue. One year accussing Oracle of cheaping because they asked their employees to vote, and the next year JBoss does the same (asked its mailing list members to vote for JBoss).
Now of course there is this new company split off from JBoss LLC.
Still to come: will JBoss LLC removing CVS commit rights from the coredevelopers group? Will JBoss LLC go out of business?
We'll see..
In the mean time: at least people are hearing about this great product (developer tiffs aside). No such thing as bad publicity, right? Hopefully, too many people won't be scared off. Then where would all my new customers come from?
- Peter.
RimuHosting - JBoss Hosting on Linux VPS
JBoss is still around and will be for a long time. What is interesting about this is not the impact on the JBoss app server (virtually zero, IMO) but the impact on the JBoss Group's attempt to turn their skills into a money making enterprise. Open source works, we know that, but what is interesting is that so many novel attempts have been made to turn open source into a way to make money and most seem to dismally fail. This is yet another example of that.
My girlfriend used to do web site updates for the Jboss group (actually, she worked for Marc Fleury and his wife, listed as Nathalie Mason-Fleury on the website, director of marketing). She was responsible for most of the bio information going up on the site, as well as doing updates to same, updates for whatever conventions they were hosting/doing, etc. She was fresh out of a 4 year CS degree and needed a job and in this market, she took this web jockey gig.
The Jboss crew uses a CVS repository to manage their web site. It sounded fairly dumb to me when I heard it, but I suppose they feel the need for control and verification of who is making what change to the site. Now, she had never done any work with CVS before - she codes a bit in real languages but hasn't worked on any large projects. So she had to ask some help from the Jboss people on how to use CVS.
The developers, Dain for instance, were incredibly helpful. She was able to snag them on AIM at just about any hour of the day or night for whatever little questions she had about their (often malfunctioning) repository. Marc Fleury and his wife, on the other hand, were not. They were demanding, placing calls in the wee hours for changes, and expecting 1-2 hour turnaround whenever they called. When asked questions, more often than not, Mr. Fleury would take a fit on her. She asked the developers about this and one in particular volunteered that "He's an asshole to everyone, not just you".
Eventually she stopped dealing with them because they just sucked too badly to work for. Low pay, rude behavior and weird hours make for a bad mix. I'm sure they hired someone else who was more masochistic perhaps.
A close friend of the Fleurys (she knows them socially in Atlanta) made the comment recently that Marc owns his own company because he would find it impossible to work _for_ anyone else due to his attitude. I suggest that the recent defections might have something to do with the aforementioned.
On a positive note, Mr. Fleury has found a way to make money off of an open source project. I suppose that deserves kudos. I've known a few businessmen who, while they knew how to make money, were unable to keep the business operating long term because they made strategic errors or alienated people. I suspect Mr. Fleury is going to fall into that category. Maybe he'll learn some lessons for his next business (he's the kind of guy who will assuredly hit the ground running no matter what happens)...
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Stephen Hobbs, USA
CFO/Controller
After college, Stephen spent almost 7 years in the US Navy, working as a Russian linguist before becoming a SEAL in SEAL Team 2, the Navy's Special Operations branch.