Slashdot Mirror
JBoss Caught in Anonymous Posting Scheme
Reader scubabear writes "For years rumors have run rampant about employees of JBoss Inc. being actively encouraged to post anonymously, drumming up business by flooding the net with fake posts and simultaneously attacking competitors, all from behind a safe veil of anonymity. With the advent of a new feature for tracking users by IP on TheServerSide.com, the floodgates have been opened and those rumors have apparently been confirmed.
The Java blog space now erupted with posts from a variety of bloggers (here, here, and here for a start) exposing a variety of anonymous/pseudonymous accounts used by JBoss employees to put forth their Professional Open Source message and simultaneously slam anyone who gets in their way in online technical communities such as TheServerSide, JavaLobby, and various personal blogs. The evidence shows how a corporation can manipulate popular opinion via anonymous personalities, that open source companies can be just as ruthless as closed source when it comes to marketing their wares, and that you should never forget that your cookies and IP address can and will be tracked online. No official response has been heard yet from the JBoss crew. Disclosure: I'm one of those bloggers erupting on this issue (see my story here)."
My heart is forever broken. To think that this kind of crap would go on within the open source "Community". Newsflash : This happens everywhere. On every review site, on every opinion forum - EVERYWHERE. I have competitors anonymously bashing me on Yahoo Shopping, E-Pinions, Shopping.com etc. It is done for one reason - profit. J-Boss is trying to make money, and they are willing to use all the tools at their disposal to discredit everyone who does not share their opinions. This is nothing new and nothing that will not happen again.
Sad for Open Source primarily. Astroturfind is the sort of activity you expect from corporations like Microsoft, but I would much prefer F/OSS (and the industries it created) to flourish on its own merits, just to prove to the world that there is no need for dirty tricks when the software and development methods are good.
This is just sad. Shame on JBoss...
You know, there's no real distinction between Anon Coward and "ElitePenguin231 (771235)" who will forget his slashdot password in a couple months. I'd say than 10% of slashdotters post with personally-idenfiable information.
Sure OSDN can track you, but that's not going to stop you from astroturfing.
My first job, at IBM, wonderful, the only company I'll name because they were perfect. Awesome. My granddad set me down before I took it, he had 35 years there and is a true blue retiree, blue to the end. He told me something that I still remember, it may not be the best place, they have their problems but not once was he ever asked to do or expected to do something uncomfortable for him ethically. They don't speak negatively about their competitors, generally, and they don't expect anyone to. I got bored, the place didn't move fast enough for me, there were politics but I never felt obliged to do anything uncomfortable, in 5 years. It didn't seem like much at the time.
Next job. They cursed at each in the status meetings, first week there I was treated to a stream of insults during a status meeting, because that's how they are. In the two years there I saw people lie to other people I saw people intentionally break code before handing it over to business partners. I saw a whole assortment of dishonesty. That shit runs down hill. They will treat you that way by the time you're done. I remember some of the meetings with vendors, I felt embarassed, I felt like we were treating them like crap and I was ashamed to be part of it. It's one thing to hate your job and just do it because they pay you to and you're a professional; something else because you don't like the way the company makes other people feel. I'm not talking about cut-throat business or anything like that, I'm talking about making people feel bad about themselves, on purpose. There is something to be said about professional conduct.
Insert a few good years of consulting, pretty much clean and pure capitalism. All the shit is kind of taken care of before you start. I always felt inclined to do more though. It may be some of the purist moments of my career; I did work and got paid and that was that. Not completely satisfying, I didn't get to see a lot of projects all the way through, but not all together bad either.
Now I work for a startup with the real deal sleezy VC people pulling the strings. We take open source software, put some pretty kind of GUI on it and then oversell it to people and charge a lot of money. At first we didn't want to admit that we used open source until we learned that it was a benefit in the market place. During that time we actually tried to hide the technology under the covers. Then we started claiming that we did more to it, we took it and made it better, when in reality we never touched a damn thing. Then we placed a couple of TM's on shit that the OSS does, gave it a name and called it our own. Then when an author took exception to some of our practices we were told to go out anonymously and bad mouth him. We've done this to 2 or 3 open source authors. (Now I've done a fair amount of my own OSS coding, I'm a bit of an ideologist and I'm kind of taking a back seat in this new biz, I know what it's like to have people telling you your free code is shit and that you're no good because of it.) I've never directly disobeyed my boss until I got here, if they asked me to do something and the pay kept coming, I'd do it even if I thought it was bad engineering or something; here they have asked me on several occasions to try to influence people, use my reputation to do it, do it anonymously, to try to spread bad FUD about specific people, all while riding on their backs and I won't do it. I sit in on sales calls all the time and we pretty much lie to people, I know how sales is and you put your best side forward but we lie to people. "Do you support blah hardware?" The answer is that we support a particular model, the answer told is that we support most models. I've been tutored in the techniques, you are never supposed to say no, first you say that most people don't want that to make the customer think they are odd by asking for something nobody wants, then you change the subject, then if that doesn't w