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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.'"
Who are the JBosses now?
From their site...
We are pleased to announce the founding of Core Developers Networkâ, a new services company supporting enterprise open source Java software. Core Developers Network is a partnership of peers with the guiding principles of integrity, openness, and fairness. Its charter is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects.
Many of our partners are core developers with cvs commit privileges on the JBoss project, and this enables us to offer a wide range of services geared towards the JBoss server, including professional documentation, training and expert support.
The focus of Core Developers Network, however, is wider than just JBossâ, and we have partners with cvs commit privileges on other projects including Jetty, Apache Jakarta, and XDoclet. Direct support is available today for these projects, as well as 3rd party support for several other Core Technologies.
We are committed to having the same level of involvement in our current projects that we have had in the past. This means that we will continue to work on the JBoss project itself. In addition, we will continue to support the JBoss project via the jboss-development and jboss-users mailing lists maintained by SourceForge.net, as well as any other open public forum. Unfortunately, the forums on jboss.org are a commercial venue for the JBoss Group LLC, and therefore we will not be participating in them.
A few of our partners have offered support through the JBoss Group LLC in the past, but for various reasons have concluded that their professional aspirations would be better served outside of the JBoss Group LLC. In order to ensure that customers previously supported by our partners continue to receive the same level of high quality support, Core Developers Network is offering these customers a limited amount of free support during this transition period.
We want to emphasize that our partners will continue to provide the same responsive, high-quality technical support as we have always done. The founding of Core Developers Network simply signals the natural emergence of competition in the marketplace. We hope that broadening the range of service options for open source projects will raise the level of support available and lead to even greater adoption of these Core Technologies.
Please look for us at JavaOneâ booth 1705!
Core Developers Network
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Free your mind.
6:30 am -- I scrape myself off of Dain's couch and grab the laptop. Dain is perched over a cup of coffee, wearing his "code poet" shirt. My luggage and tripod are by the front door. On our way out to the car I ask myself "are we really going to go through with this?"
--------
Free your mind.
As of today's date they are still coding on the JBoss porject..
There servered their consulting contracts JBoss group only..
People really should master the skil of reading sometime soon..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
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
same as the old boss.
JPHB project....
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!
That hurts. Not only did they have to throw together a site in secret, as soon as it hits the net it has to face slashdot. I will be truly impressed if it survives.
Those servers that are about to die, I salute you.
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
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.
_looks up from work on tomcat_
_thinks to self: People still care about EJBs? Who knew?_
_goes back to work on tomcat_
(I exaggerate, for comic effect, of course)
Cheers,
prat
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
We are moving our focus from Java to PHP, and whill henceforth be known as PHBoss.
The real question is what the tripod was for? And did it have anything to do with him on the couch
;-)
I think the real question is: Is Dain's last name "Bramage"?
Inquisitive minds just gotta ask....
Sorry I couldn't resist.
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.
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
nothing to see here. move on.
JBoss is an open sourced Enterprise Java Server, simialar to BEA Weblogic or IBM's WebSphere. JBoss isn't truly certified as J2EE compliant yet because as a free software package they're not forking over the dough to Sun for the compliance testing.
He was the coolest villain on Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors!
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...
I'm not sure why the first post got a +4 informative as it was just a cut and paste of the CDN Web page.
JBoss (project page project page is a Java Application Server for Enterprise Java Beans (EJB's). They are working on a free implementation of J2EE. It includes JBossServer which is the application server, JBossCX for JCA, JBossCMP for persistence, JBossMQ for JMS, JBossMail (obvious), JBossSX for JAAS, JBossTX for JTA/JTS, and more that you can see on the project page.
There is always the Google cache too.
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
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...
Does that mean JBoss will sue them for $1B and send threatening letters to 1500 of their customers?
Well, pretending to work got us a $150,000 PO last week from a MAJOR semiconductor manufacturer. So if "pretending to work" will get us a PO of that size in this economy, I'll stick to pretending.
ymmv
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 4.0 DR1 (Developer Release 1) is based on Aspect Oriented Programming.
Check it out!:
Aspect-Oriented Programming and JBoss
JBoss 4.0 Developer Release JBoss
JBoss Aspect Oriented Programming
Download it now!
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
Really. This won't affect my ASP.NET/IIS/C# contract one wit.
Only doing what they pay me to do. If they want my opinion, I tell 'em straight up - it all sucks. That invoice is due now.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
How about SunONE App Server 7 Platform Edition?
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.
An application server is a set of tools that do a lot of the scalability work for you. For example, let's say you have a database that 100G big. You have classes/objects that map to all of this data, each referencing each other. Now to instantiate an object, it will require data from the database. It also likely has a pointer to another object which is tied to the database. So, you have three choices:
* Have instantiation of one object bring half the database into memory
* Write code that intelligently loads and unloads references seamlessly from the database on demand (_lots_ of work)
* Get someone else's code to do it for you
Option 3 is the application server. Remember also that if you have your application spread across 13 servers, and all of them need access to the same object, where is the object going to live? If you have 13 copies of it, what happens if an instance gets modified - how do the other 12 instances know to reload their data? If you keep it on one server, how are you going to handle load balancing intelligently?
The purpose of application servers is to have a canned infrastructure capable of handling these problems well. There are many other plumbing considerations that application servers keep track of, such as nested transactions, being able to remap data items onto different tables/attributes, being able to set the environment of an application through a simple text-based descriptor, etc.
Usually I've found that for smaller-scale projects, application servers are overkill. However, for large-scale projects, they keep your project from becoming the ultimate hack-job. The trade-off probably hits when you have about 3 front-end webservers. For some items it hits as soon as you need 2 servers, for the load-balancing/synchronization problems.
Engineering and the Ultimate
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.
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.
The purpose of application servers is to have a canned infrastructure capable of handling these problems well. There are many other plumbing considerations that application servers keep track of...
you missed the point by a mile, the main purpose of the application server is to hold your business logic tier in a multi tier application, so you have a database-vendor neutral application, and the option to use multiple clients like web, standalone desktop applictions, mobile devices etc..etc.., scalability and mangeability are just bonuses...
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.
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.
JDICTATOR. It doesn't order your java software to perform it routinely tourtures a random sample of javasoftware as a warning to others. It fights performances issues "to the Pain". So far it just consists of C code with big ears that gets picked on a lot, so look out, it will have a chip on its shoulder when it gets loose.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Don't be silly.
Even if one isn't ever going to change your database, and even if you will have only one type of client, using an application server can be helpful, because of the (hopefully) solid infrastructure they can provide.
And even if one isn't using an application server, it's good design practice to design things in a tiered fashion. You can, and should, keep the business logic pretty separate from the interface code. The same goes for the persistence layer. There's no reason to drop $100k on an app server just to keep your code separate.
That said, I have so far never actually seen a use of EJBs that wasn't a giant clusterfuck. I'm in the middle of rewriting a web app that was built with EJBs, and it's pathetic; using their expensive app server and their expensive Sun hardware, they can serve maybe 60 pageviews a minute.
I'm tearing most of that cruft out and just using Hibernate, a great open-source object/relational persistence layer. One need notdto anything weird to one's objects (no special interfaces, no common base classes, no weird methods). It's swell.
But had I my druthers, I'd have used Prevayler. Their whole dataset is maybe 1 GB. For that, you don't even need a database; you can just keep it all in RAM.
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.
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