Slashdot Mirror
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?
same as the old boss.
The real question is what the tripod was for? And did it have anything to do with him on the couch.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
Here are the faces behind those names in the article.
Siggy Say, Siggy Do
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
_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.
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
SWEET! The D&D Player's Handbook is going to be available in Java?! I'm so excited, I don't even know what that means? Hopefully, they'll port it to XML and other buzz-worthy technologies soon. Haha, stick it to WotC
God, I'm a dork. I (futily) hope someone else finds this amusing.
--I hate big sigs.
...right after they realy should masster the skil of speling!
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
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
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.
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.