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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)."
This anonymous stuff is just a bunch of crap. Why anyone would listen to someone posting anonymously is beyond me.
Just take my advice, don't listen to anonymous posters...ever! Even if their argument is completely flawless and/or logically impermeable, ignore them.
(By the way, I don't work for JBoss, so you can listen to me.)
JBOSS IS AWESOMEEMO!
- Not a JBOSS employee
- Really I'm not
Casual Games/Downloads
Bloggers do something useful? I don't believe it for a second.
Life in Orange County
You get what you pay for in free online forums. Here on Slashdot, you're welcome to publish what you want, but if you don't want to be tied to an e-mail-confirmed user account then you have to accept that your username will display as "Anonymous Coward", be penalized in the point-based mod system (assuming the user hasn't overriden the setting from the default), and you'll still be IP and cookie tracked for whatever purposes OSDN wants.
Mainstream media outlets at least do their best to make their commentators and reporters declare any conflicts of interests they have so that viewers can know about it when considering information from that source. But, non-mainstream outlets are more direct... you get "closer" information, but you also take the risk of what happens when a source with conflicts is allowed to speak unchallenged. Which seems to be exactly what happened here.
Seriously, who is going to take a company that prides itself on being a Proffesional Open Sourse Company.... have to wonder what marketing genious came up with that one...
drunk chemists
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.
"...that open source companies can be just as ruthless as closed source when it comes to marketing their wares"...What is the point of this sentence? Why should an Open Source company be above such diabolical behaviour? Because OSS folks are pure of heart? This is really pushing the Zealot button now. Ergh.
Isn't doing anything new. This particular technique was around long before the internet, or blogs...
-LoneWolf-
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
Will Accenture want to keep that big logo on their home page?
I wouldn't, but then again, it's accenture.
Im actually working for 7 governments and 14 large corporations to spy on the slashdot community and try to sway their opinion. also i sometimes spell things wrong to make it look like im just an average person.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
...that all of /.'s "Anonymous Coward" postings bashing SCO can be backtracked to Linus now?
You can't really publish anything truely anonymously. You never really could anyway. The closest thing is to find somebody who is willing to know who you are who is willing to accept your writing and publish it without crediting you while disclaiming that somebody else wrote it. Of course, that person has to accept the legal liability that comes with publishing that work as if they wrote it themselves.
Yep, some speech does come with a legal liablity attached. "Free speech" is a great ideal, but it is also subject to the greater ideal of "Your rights end where somebody else's rights begin." That is, you can't use free speech to give instructions that put somebody else into danger or spreads lies about somebody else. That's just not your right to do because it ends up damaging somebody else's rights.
People who oversimplfy the Bill of Rights... such as those who claim that the 1st Amendment protects all expressions of speech from all authorites everywhere, or that the 5th Amendment means you'll never have to tell of your own crimes in court if you don't want to are making sophomoric mistakes. They sound right, but they're not.
The same goes for this suposed "right" to be annonymous. You can try... but there's always somebody who can squeal on you if they want to.
Actually, in today's world of lawsuits, posting slanderous material on the internet is termed libel, not slander.
This is interesting, because if you can remember the stock market has even been swayed by posts on the yahoo economic forums in the past...I think this is a step in the right direction, anonimity is great and all, but when your using it to ruin the competition and make yourself look better (or in the case of the stock market to weasel people out of their money) then someone has to crack down on you....in this case I'm even more excited because it seems to be public/private intervention rather then the government, so these people DEFFINATELY are going to get what's just deserts for their actions.
I wonder how well we'll be able to trust what we read on the Internet. Oh wait. Do we trust everything we read, as it is today?!
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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...
Ya da da da da da da
Secret Smurf!
Astroturf!
The thing that really makes me laugh is that the last slashdot article featuring SCO getting an award for FUDdism also has some nice comments about JBoss.
Don't be evil, please.
I guess I don't see the problem. Whether the posters were anonymous or not, don't their opinions and refutations of the facts matter?
"When these masked marauders enter a discussion, you are no longer debating facts and opinions; instead, you are fencing with a phantom"
So the people are masked, their motives are unknown, but the discussions are still real, yes? Here at Slashdot, people can post anonymously, or with presumed pseudonyms/identities; I still don't see the problem.
If some engineer tells you that you should implement some feature you either agree or disagree, it shouldn't matter that the engineer is from company X or some guy in a basement.
This whole post seems like a rant from people who have a grudge so deep against JBOSS that they have made a policy of disagreeing with the company as a whole. Is it any wonder that such a flagrant policy has made JBOSS go undercover? How ironic is it that these people can have a normal discussion with "faceless individuals" but as soon as they realize those individuals were from JBOSS they want to scream bloody murder?
Joseph Elwell.
Linky. There's no guarantee anyone will read it, though. Them's the breaks.
HAND.
I don't mean to start a flame war, but honestly... TSS is a great spot to find articles related to J2EE, but I don't hang out there much simply because they do not have moderation, karma bonuses, etc. I would post and read comments a lot more if there were those features. Until then, /. is my home.
True words, and it's a shame. There is a source of help that's lost to some groups, such as sexual abuse survivors, when there is no truly anonymous forum (anon.penet.fi, we miss ya...).
The tragedy-of-the-commons aspect is that it takes responsible adults who respect each other to preserve anonymized communication. Fraudsters always get their fingers in the pie, as well as those who promote ever-increasing surveillance ("It's for the children !")
Freedom's just another word for nothing left yto lose...
<grrr>
I must say that I am shocked to hear that some thing like this could take place, and on the internet of all places. I thought that every thing I read on the internet was true and that I would make millions from forwarding emails and that hot 18 year old on AIM that wants me is not a man.
Oh wait, I'm retarded...
Trust nothing you read on the internet...I am sexy!
It looks more like the parent poster is just pissed off that the guys/gals of JBoss have different opinions. None of the referenced posts appeared to be FUD or PR. Every post I saw in that thread was what I would expect the personal opinions of those individuals to be. What, if you participate in business, you must at all times put your professional reputation -- and that of your entire corporation -- on the line? Bull.
I almost never post 'anonymously,' however, I put a pretty hefty distance between my online postings and my actual professional life. In fact, in many cases, my personal opinions have been restrained by contract. I can't post "I, an employee of XYZ organization involved in ABC project feel this way." That's what corporate PR departments are for and it is such standard practice to curtail officila public comments--for good reasons--that it smacks as pretty ignorant to start whining that someone isn't slapping their corporate logo on every utterance.
JBoss is a solid product and their licensing and revenue models are downright charitable. The posts addressing those issues were absolutely on the mark and perfectly justifiable. So there was some petty personal squabble. Big deal. Someone doesn't like you. Wah. This whole conspiracy theory comes off as pretty fscking childish in that context.
They want to make money AND give something away and you don't like that for some reason.
Get over it.
I know you were being funny, but this is a very clever (albeit very unethical) and common technique. I know that at my last company (who had, well, some additional ethical concerns, but anyway) they would post on targeted message boards hyping up their site and would pretend to be happy customers. It's highly cheap, low effort, and effective.
It sucks because unlike marketing efforts and vendors' sales messages, which everyone has learned to always take with a grain of salt, I'm inclined to believe, often instantly and completely, a slashdot posting endorsing product X, because the poster seems unaffiliated and genuine and doesn't really have anything to gain from endorsing it.
In fact, it's very dangerous, because my trust can be easily manipulated this way; I usually don't have time to bother to verify the source of a given posting (Think of how many hundreds or thousands of posts you read a year). However, if I encounter product Y sometime later having read something about it before, I usually vaguely remember whether the post said the product was any good or not and that will usually determine my first impression. In that way, libelous anonymous postings are very dangerous -- I remember hearing some people post that "Python sucked" (probably because of some BS like the whitespace indentation) and for that reason I stayed away for several years until reading some very positive articles and posts -- and now it's one of my most useful productivity tools and I could have saved ridiculous amounts of development time reinventing the wheel had I known about it before. That's kind of a trivial example, but when $ is involved, it's even worse.
Sadly, it's basically the next form of spam. Most of us used to read (mostly) every word of all our emails -- now spam and outrageous commerical claims make that means of communication virtually useless. It will be a shame to see message boards and blogs, etc, filled with this kind of crap (blogs are already targeted by spammers). However, postings by these kinds of shills are often pretty blatant and easy to spot just because of their outrageous claims and distinctive style, but they will get more and more subtle. They're also virtually impossible to track, since real people are on the other end (and you can only really ban problem users after the damage has already been done). And if a company pays a few random dialup users (a tactic my old company was about to try -- yes, I've left since) to troll the net and make these kinds of postings, good luck trying to prove that the company did it or trying to track down or prosecute them.
Really, the only way to tell is to view a given poster's karma/post history and to look for certain suspicious patterns.
-fren
"Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?"
An Open Source (LGPL) implementation of a J2EE aplication server.
There is a lot more than PHP out there, you know?
If you look at subroutine checkForOpenProxy in Slashcode, you'll notice that it contains a hand-written port scanner/proxy checker built in Perl. Slashdot uses this to aggressively port scan and service map any IP address that tries to post anonymously, and saves the result in the DB. While this does have the unfortunate side affect of setting off IDS sensors across the globe and disrupting poorly hardened services on ports in Slash's scan list, it has the benefit of keeping us safe from those who would use a proxy to maintain anonymity, such as Chinese dissidents and corporate whisteblowers.
That site is full of so much flaming and mindless shrieking, it makes me wonder how Java gets anywhere. Seriously, there are a few exceptions, but the average quality of comments there make Slashdot seem like a community of polite geniuses by contrast.
This is another ugly story that shows how little we need SCO and Microsoft to attack the open source community, because we are so willing to do their work for them.
First, JBoss Group betrayed the trust of what should have been a largely sympathetic community in TheServerSide with their anonymous posting campaign.
The fraud was exposed by levelheaded participants, including the submitter of this story and staff at TheServerSide.
Then, the opportunists jumped in.
Some bloggers gleefully joined the witchhunt, accusing their least favorite people of being anonymous posters, including real people, of course.
When I told one blogger that he needed to offer evidence when he accused someone of being an anonymous poster, he publically implied that I supported the posting scheme.
Several of the bloggers are themselves contributors to respected open-source projects, making this a particularly disturbing form of cannibalism.
The net result is another wedge driven into what was already an overly polarized community. No real winners here.
that open source companies can be just as ruthless as closed source when it comes to marketing their wares,
An ethnic minority person walks into an ethnic majority bar and orders a beer. The ethnic majority guy next to him says, "we don't like your kind around here." Words are exchanged, and the ethnic minority guy pulls out a knife. The ethnic majority guy pulls out a gun and shoots him. Ethnic majority guy turns to the bartender and says, "just like an ethnic slur to bring a knife to a gun fight."
So what should you do when the enemy is both more powerful and unethical? Most business people don't grasp (or care about) the long run benefits of open source software. If they don't see the open source equivalent as being better - and let me stress, they have to see it as being better, regardless of whether it is better - if they don't see it as a better product, they're not going to use it. If they're reading the trades, the open source people should be promoting their products there by all means necessary. Anonymous? Do you think Microsoft's shills on this site are adding disclaimers? This isn't pattycake, this is business. This is war. If you can't handle it, at least stay out of the way.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
When google fails ;)
JBoss
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
JBoss (pronounced Jay Boss) is an open source, Java based application server. Because it is Java based, JBoss can be used on any operating system that supports Java. It is open source, but a company (also named JBoss) creates it. The company has a tech consultation service, but the consultants spend half of their time programming.
JBoss implements the entire J2EE suite of services.
The Sims Online uses JBoss to run its multiplayer games.
Just wait, they will hire that Iraqi minister
"It is all a lie, there was no blogs, there is no internet! YOU ARE NOT ON THE INTERNET I TRIPLE PROMISE YOU!"
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
Here is a copy of Hani's excellent Bile Blog.
JBoss panties around ankles, again.
Does the fun ever stop with these guys? It turns out that theserverside.com forums now has an interesting new feature that many of you might not be aware of. If you click on a particular user, you will see all the other users that have logged in from the same IP.
Obviously, this method is not foolproof, and can be easily misinterpreted to mean that two people behind the same proxy are indeed one and the same.
Having said that though, it is with immense glee that I see that once and for all, the JBoss wankstains can be seen for the hypocritical, conniving, underhanded, petty and insecure little fuckwits that they are.
So, let's pick a user at random! Say..ohhh I dunno...Marc Fleury. Who else does the slimy little fleury have hidden away in this too-large-for-one-person personality of his? Why, none other than our friend Arun Patel! Arun, for those of you unfamiliar with TSS, posts incredibly offensive polemics that happen to exactly mirror the unspoken thoughts of a certain JBoss cult. To be fair, many of the posts are too eloquent to be His Royal Garlicness, what with his penchant for multiple exclamation marks, rambling sentences, and all round freakish usage of full stops.
So, who else posts from that IP? Well, we have James Hardy. James' posts are often of the 'I'm sane but lets face it, JBoss rule' variety, as opposed to another on that list of deranged psychopaths, Chip Tyler. Chippie here will eagerly pipe in in any number of threads to say how much CDN suck, as well as how every move JBoss makes is intelligent and wise. There are literally dozens of other accounts that show how widespread this behaviour is. The only thing they have in common is a surprising love and admiration for all things JBossy, and disdain and abuse for all things non-JBossy.
Needless to say, Ben Sabrin and the majority of the JBoss folks are all on the trail too. So while it's impossible to actually draw lines between the fakes and their puppetmasters, it's very very easy to spot the group of nefarious rumprangers who have embarked on this laughably incompetent marketing exercise. Having said that, some of the linkages are very clear and easy to follow to individuals who happen to not work in the same turdfactory as the fleurys do. Bill Burke has the highly dubious honour of also being Joe Murray, famous for making noises to the effect of 'Mike Spille doesn't exist!'. Let's see you uuhmm and err your way out of this one Billy! Marc'll have you back in that gimp suit pretty sharpish if you keep being this sloppy.
It all makes an awful lot of sense, if you think about it. JBoss is very very little beyond a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. I was actually surprised at how many people at TSSS for example smirked when I asked if they used JBoss. The silent majority pretty much views that server as a bit of a joke, and rightfully so!
What is stunning is how they seem to have next to no capacity for learning. Come on garlicboy, how fucking hard can it be to write a classloader? Do you really NEED UnifiedClassLoader, UnifiedClassLoader2, AND UnifiedClassLoader3? Didn't your mother teach you how to name classes? The thing is, it'd fine if you lot were just crapping out hilarious code. Sadly, it isn't enough for you, instead you feel the need to go out of your way and create a million fake accounts everywhere just to spread the word and hijack any potentially intelligent conversation. Are you that scared of innovation and a world where JBoss co-exists with the rest of humanity?
The saddest part about all this is that the most likely outcome is for these posters to now ensure they use a different IP when posting, to disguise the trail more effectively. I'm sure the very notion of 'gosh, maybe we should let our software do the talking instead of using underhanded tactics like these' is heretical in that camp.
So, the next time you see someone posting anything positive about JBoss, rest assured
After all, JBoss's second Core Value is "Group trust and personal integrity."
- We operate internally on the basis of mutual trust. Nobody in the company will knowingly deceive another member.
- We are honest.
- We tell the truth among ourselves, to our clients, to our partners, to our investors, to our prospects.
- We are committed to profitability and sound finances. We are thrifty.
- We place the needs of the federation of projects above individual ones.
Note to self: anyone who has to claim that they're honest probably isn't.Note to self: anyone who has to state that they're honest probably isn't.
Wow, that's gutsy, anonymously advertising a movie in this thread. Were you meaning to be ironic?
Your credit card information wants to be free.
Check out My article on the subject. Basically it talks about the problems of corporations as apposed to sole proprietorships.
Engineering and the Ultimate
Usually though if someone did something like that on a public forum, they would be called out if the statements were untrue (if the readership is large enough to have anyone that would care). So it still balances out to some extent, by people posting they had no problems with a product someone else did not like, and perhaps disagreeing with rosy assesments of other software.
In the end I'm not sure how much effect comments like these really have, as there is balance.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's stupid and dangerous. Posted By: Mouloud - on May 18, 2004 @ 05:58 AM in response to Message #122469 1 replies in this thread
... deleted some
Retroactively identifying people is highly foolish - particular subsequentely linking individuals to a company. If a site provides an anonymous mode:
If people using anonymous mode in an "unethical way" may be a problem - remove it, give everybody warning and move on.
No i don't work for JBoss, and yes i know IP/cookies etc. are tracked - however i don't expect amazon of anybody else to post what that information!
.sig
IMHO there should be more of an air gap between the OS project and the for profit JBoss group. But they did produce a good product, so maybe $$ is a good motivational tool even in the OS arena.
> What does WTF mean?
What's a Nubian?
Now THIS is an interesting article. It touches on several issues at once: Privacy, Honesty, Openness, Conspiracy, Propaganda, Media manipulation... I could go on.
...um... thirty something, combined. OK, its drivel, but if you multiply that by all the Internet users, there is some good stuff out there that would not be out there otherwise. The trick is of course to separate out the good stuff from the drivel. You know, signal to noise ratios and all that. Systems like Slashdot's moderation system help, but they are a long way from perfect yet. In particular...
We all want privacy don't we? Do you really want someone throwing a rock through your window because you said something negative about a group they are a member of on Slashdot?
Open Source is all about, well, openness right? It seems so ironic that a company based on the Open Source philosophy would do such a thing. But how many times have many of us said that Open Source is about freedom to create not about anti-commerce. If it is ever proven that Open Source companies CAN'T be profitable, then I think the future of Open Source will be bleak.
Media manipulation is both harder and easier with the popularity of the Internet. Anyone who wants to can be a publisher now. How many of you regular posters to Slashdot used to write letters to the editor of your local paper on a regular basis? I know I didn't. I've written more on issues I care about in the last 2 years than the previous
Systems such as Slashdot are easy targets for conspiracy. We "rate" one another by name. My real identity MAY be secret, at least if I've been very very careful, but unless I do all my "Karma whoring" under this id and all my controversial posts anonymously, people are going to have a pretty good idea of what cmacb thinks about things. They may have a pretty good idea of what other Internet activities I engage in, who my online friends are, and a lot of other inferences not so easily drawn. Am I comfortable with this? Sometimes I'm not so sure...
The other day I posted what I thought was a perfectly normal reaction to a Slashdot article. I was a bit surprised that it got quickly modded up to a 5 (I really don't care that much about mod points other than the general "acceptability" of what I've said) I was even more surprised though to find myself personally insulted several times in the 14 posts that followed and then shocked to see the posts containing nothing more than insults modded up to 3, 4 and 5 while my original post dropped down to "1 troll". There was nothing the least bit resembling a troll in my post. I didn't bother to defend it though, as I don't want rocks through my window and I had clearly offended a group who, by their own writings, is capable of doing such a thing. Hopefully the fact that they had enough mod points among them to make my post disapear and their insults at me "informative" that they won't be tempted to hunt me down as well.
It made me realize that Slashdot, and several other systems I use just like it, are broken in a serious way. The moderation is good, but allowing me to filter posts based on WHO and individual is is just plain wrong. Some of the best posts I've seen on Slashdot are AC and some of the worst are by other people with good Karma. But I'm more interested in rating the post than the person. Why can't Slashdot (and systems like it) tally the ratings on my posts in such a way that nobody even knows what my ID is? Essentially combining the moderation and meta moderation and providing anonymity at the same time. I thiink that if you rated a particular poster poorly some number of times you would stop seeing their posts, without even knowing who they are or that you had done so. Some people ONLY want to see posts they AGREE with, and those people could rate posts accordingly and they would gradually get their wish. Others (like me) would rate on the "quality" of the posts without regard to agreeing or disagreeing with the content, and event
You ruined a potentially good joke. You should have said: What the fuck does WTF mean?
A few years ago, during the dotBoom, I was looking for a summer job/internship in the marketing area of IT. I went on one interview where they were looking for me to go on BBS', and in chat rooms, and front their product, as if I were a satisfied user. This would be my job, 8 hours a day, just running around the 'Net looking for ways to infiltrate the masses and say how good their product was.
I didn't get the job, b/c I think they could tell I wasn't happy with their idea during the interview.
-bZj
.sig
Sorry, not even close. I'm not an employee of CDN, have never been, am not affiliated with them in any way. Neither are the other bloggers referenced. The only person referenced with any affiliation with JBoss is Rickard, who used to be a major committer on JBoss.
The reason I blogged about this is really simple: truth. Yeah, I know, that sounds trite and stupid, but that really is the main motivation. JBoss people have been posing with very convincing names like "Chip Tyler" and "Joe Murray" for quite some time now, talking up their own product, dissing people like the CDN folks, and directly going after people like me. Some of it got quite nasty as well - and all under the cover of fake names. NOT anonymous ones - no Anonymous Coward. One of them - someone claiming to be Arun Patel but really a senior JBoss executive - went so far as to say online that he worked for WIPRO in Bangalore, India, and to attempt to prove that I was a shill. And he did this when the guy actually has e-mailed me and knew exactly who I really am. The icing on the cake is that the individual _setup the fake Arun Patel account using his real corporate e-mail address_.
This isn't about a vendetta, or revenge, or personalities clashing. It's about exposing a company that uses deceitful tactics to gain market share and simultaneosuly attack individuals and companies. I personally don't care if it's common or not - no matter how prevalent it may, it's still wrong and it should be rooted out and exposed when it's discovered.
Keep in mind also that this was a coordinated corporate policy, and it involved the "big names" at JBoss, and sometimes the weight of faker posts would actually overwhelm entire threads.
It was coordinated, it was nasty, and had high volumes over a span of well over a year.
-Mike Spille
You have to realize first that this really did go on for years, and involves hundreds of posts. The motivations seemed to be three fold. 1) Show JBoss in a good light. 2) Disparage competing products. 3) Gain control of discussion threads, and discredit people who wrote negative posts regarding JBoss.
A big key of this is hijacking threads. If a thread started going "bad" from a JBoss perspective, both employees with their real names and fake names would sweep in simultaneously posting positive things about JBoss and refuting negative parts. They literally turned some threads from being anti-JBoss to looking positive.
Along the way, they made people who posted any negative JBoss posts look like they were the bad guys. "Oh poor us, look, these mean people are persecuting us!". This is a prime JBoss tactic - do something underhanded and slimy, and if there's a whiff of being caught make the people doing the catching look like the bad guys - and make yourself look like a poor victim.
Keep in mind that, having literally done it for years, they're pretty good at it. No blatant cheerleading. Sometimes they would put a mild negative comment in to make the post look more realistic "gee, CMP really sucked, but I hear it's better in 3.2", or "yeah their JMS wasn't that good, but they say they're making it better - anyone know anymore about that?".
To judge it, you have to look at the volume of threads and volume of posts over time. The blogs referenced have touched upon only maybe 5-10% of the total! We had neither the time or energy to exhaustively post everything the fake users did. If you happen to have the time, check out some of the threads on TheServerSide. Watch for their entry into them, and watch them turn the tide of opinion on a thread, and discredit naysayers along the way. In an odd way you have to respect it - they've raised these fake posts to an art form, they've honed their craft over many years.
Oh, sorry, I'm too deep into the community and forgot that what's obvious to me may not be obvious to the world at large.
The CDN folks are some of the leads for the Geronimo project. This is an Apache-licensed J2EE application server.
In other words, it's a new free Java application server which is in direct competition to JBoss. Since it's Apache, anybody can use it (and particularly modify and distribute it) with far fewer restrictions than with JBoss. They are a direct competitor to JBoss - a direct open source competitor.
The JBoss fake posters publically called the technical skills of the CDN/Geronimo folks into question. They did exactly the same to the other major open source Java server, the Jonas people.
The purpose is simple: generate interest and market share for JBoss, get the residual interest that pays their training/services/support bills. Do it by boosting your own stuff, and trying to do verbal hatchet jobs on your competitors and detractors. Make regular people who happen to disagree with you or compete with you look like the bad guys, make you look like poor besieged victims and underdogs.
As for the rest - you'd be surprised what a fake grass roots campaign like this can do. In combination with other legit marketing techniques, it's powerful and persuasive. It gets them just enough attention to get articles written, to get research firms like Gartner and Forrester to take notice - and to get enough attention to get VC funding.
I can understand your puzzlement given the examples and if you're not in the community. But imagine the sample of posts in the referenced blogs - and now imagine 500, 600, 700 of them over years. It has an effect, a very measurable effect. Smearing the names of people who disagree with you just serves to magnify that effect, particularly when it _seems_ to come from uninterested parties.
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
No it isn't... Their classloader design in simply broken (at least in the 3.x series - which I tried). It's maybe possible to use JBoss in an 1 Server - 1 Application environment, but forget it if you want to use more than one application using the same libraries in different versions... In that case you're screwed!
DRM is a farcical use of encryption. Until a bunch of corporate lame-brains decided they were smarter than Alan Turing, the accepted use of encryption was to secure comm channels. An alternative use is to limit access to data to whoever possesses the keys. Specifically, it was intended to allow Alice to talk and share info with Bob without Eve listening in.
Even that well defined chunk of functionality is rife with botchable details. Anyone with half a clue also knew that even if the channel was secured correctly that incorrect or malicious behaivor on either side of the link could compromise it.
Now we have DRM. In DRM, Bob wants to communicate something to Alice but at the same time he wants to prevent Alice from communicating it to Eve. All of the data and necessary keys are in Alice's possession. Granted, the data and keys are obfuscated but she in still in physical possession of everything needed to decrypt the data.
From a strictly information theoretic point of view, why should anyone take that scenario seriously? Bob can make it varying degrees of PITA for Alice to blab to Eve but there is no inherent security here.
that's Fleury's whole tactic: whine about how attacking JBoss is bad for the community. Remember when Apache announced their (competing) app server? Fleury pissed about how it was going to weaken the OSS movement, etc. etc. and we should all rally around JBoss. I hope Fleury's investors ask for their money back.
So now we are supposed to think JBoss sucks because nobody who knows better really uses it, and only shills endorse it (does anybody who knows better really use EJBs anyway? The architecture sucks, and that's Sun's fault, not JBoss'). Fine, so what the hell is the alternative? Apache Geronimo isn't off the ground yet and got off to a rocky start with licensing issues with some reused JBoss code (that whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth about the JBoss people actually, who seemed too eager to try to discredit a competing project).
Thankfully I got out of the enterprise software world two years ago, and if I never have to see another heinous piece-of-shit EJB system for the rest of my life, I can assure you it will be too soon. Nonetheless, for my personal edification and to enlighten those I still interact with who are stuck in that world, what the hell Open Source J2EE platform ought they to be using?
If you go to their forums you'll get a taste of the sheer nastiness around JBoss:
Altogether a very unpleasant community. So the kinds of slimey, underhand and outright dishonest behaviour by JBoss people being reported here doesn't exactly surprise me. I guess they must take Microsoft and SCO as their inspiration.
The bad behaviour of the JBoss community has been reported previously on Slashdot.
Such a shame really as JBoss itself is an excellent App Server.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
First of all, you're _not_ an oppressed minority. You're not even oppressed. When people will start throwing slurs at you on the street, cops start pulling you over for no reason all the time, you're given only crap jobs like manning the reception desk (because they need the token minority person in a very visible place, not in some well paid job), and even then at half the salary of the ethnic majority... _then_ you can claim to be oppressed.
Second, those minorities are oppressed for something completely out of their control. They didn't choose their skin colour or face type, like on MMORPGs. Even if they wanted to get expensive surgery to change that (which is already a demeaning and stupid thing to be forced to do), they couldn't afford it. Because they're only getting the crap jobs.
Which rules crap software programmers out of that category on both counts.
(A) Noone's going to do any real discrimination against you. Au contraire, you're one of those fairly rich white-collar guys.
(B) when a company deliberately decides to release crap products and cover it with lots of nasty PR (like JBoss did), they're discriminated against for their own goddamn fault. Not for something out of their control and which they can't change.
So spare me the whiny emotional rethoric already.
And here's another thought for you: software is a _tool_. Repeat after me: "software is a _tool_."
It's _only_ job and role is to get a job done. A company or individual using it should see some benefit from it. That's the _only_ reason they're using it.
It is _not_ a weapon of mass destruction in your retarded ideological wars. Which is exactly what you're proposing to use it as and for. You don't care what collateral damage you cause, you don't care if your lies and astroturfing cause someone a loss. You just care about getting ahead in a petty imaginary war against Microsoft.
In other words, the exact same morals as scammers and those virus writers selling zombie machines.
And I wish such people would die a slow painful death. It's about time this industry returned to being about providing something useful, instead of being one big bullshitter contest.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.