JBoss's Fleury Abjures Astroturfing

comforteagle writes "JBoss head honcho Marc Fleury has laid down the law about Astroturfing in the aftermath of being accused of the practice without actually admitting it was done. 'Our visibility and success puts our customers and partners in a situation where you expect and demand that employees of JBoss Inc. hold themselves to that higher standard. Let's put the professional back in professional open source. "Astroturfing" is hereby banned at JBoss, starting with me.'" jg21 writes "After the Slashdotting of the whole issue, the wider community took up the theme. LinuxWorld's editor in chief took to task those who sought to "pollute the knowledge space," and then Richard Öberg and Cameron Purdy took up the theme with a call to raise the cyber-bar when it coms to integrity. Now JBoss's CEO has recanted: there will be no more fake posts from JBoss staffers, he says. Hmm, time will tell."

Comments

Cynicism is (perhaps too) easy.

[Space cowboy]

I often sign myself 'Simon the cynic' when I read about personage X making some sweeping statement about how things are going to be - but for me it comes down to where the benefit is to be had. If there is no precedent or no perceivable advantage, my reaction is often (as the Poster's) "Yeah, right!".

In this case I have a (gut) feeling they're probably genuine. JBoss are up the proverbial creek - they're a commercial software house which relies on the same sort of markets as Open Source software, and they've just lost a lot of credibility. The only way out of it to them is to 'fess up, to publicly admit their wrongdoing, and pledge not to do it again. I'm also a firm believer in letting peoples actions decide my opinion of them - talk is after all cheap, especially in this digital age - and I believe in judging after the fact, not before. My regard for their (phenomenal) achievement dropped significantly when the story broke, but respect can be earnt over again. Let's see, indeed, but with an open mind.

Now that they *have* made a public pledge, and if they're caught again, it's game over in the reputation stakes. Anyone can make a mistake, and society usually forgives a single error of judgement - we generally expect people to learn, however. I think that this itself should be sufficient to keep them on the straight and narrow... Of course, this is just a different form of cynicism :-)

I thought the idea that pollution of the information space was a "crime" in and of itself was an interesting point - I generally consider the net to be something of a cesspool, and it's not just cream that floats to the top... On the other hand, dive right in (yuck. Nasty mental image) and there's a lot on offer freely which would be otherwise hard to obtain. I wonder when (if) the balance will tip so there's more cream than crap.

Simon the cynic.

Re:Cynicism is (perhaps too) easy.

[The Bungi]

They should have apologized. You know, something like "we're sorry". There's none of that there. Instead, he goes off on some vague rant about "competition" and "professionalism" and ends with "don't do it, it's bad".

That means nothing. He's just trying to put out the fire he started without admitting that he or his crew did anything wrong.

"Sorry". A powerful word, but apparently not present in his vocabulary.

Re:Cynicism is (perhaps too) easy.

[SpecBear]

You're not cynical enough.

The real problem is, there has been no admission of guilt, and nobody within the company has been pnuished so far as we know. The same corporate culture is in place. The previous article that revealed the astroturfing campaign gave the impression that the practice was widespread and reached the highest levels of the organization. Even if we take the pledge at face value, all we have is the promise that this particular dishonest practice will stop. In short, JBoss will desist not because they believe that astroturfing is dishonest and wrong, but because they were caught and it makes for bad publicity. The employees will see this, and they'll jump at the next opportunity that pops up. They'll just be a little more careful.

In that context, this pledge does nothing give me any faith in JBoss' integrity. Here's what Marc Fleury should have done:

• Openly and honestly admit all of the details of what happened
• Acknowledge and denounce any transgressions
• Apologize for creating/tolerating a corporate environment that encouraged large scale deception
• Fire the most egregious offenders
• Establish and publish a company policy that governs how employees present themselves when posting on public message boards with clear penalties defined for violators
• Really take responsibility: resign and allow someone else to come in to rebuild trust in JBoss
• 
  
  Until something more substantial happens in response to this incident, JBoss won't be on my list of vendors to consider.

Not concerned with jboss.

[Captain_Frisk]

I'm more concerned with less intelligent companies who read this article and thought... Fake posts on the internet. What a great idea. While Astroturfing has always been around, mainstream articles about it are only going to give the un-enlightened new ideas.

Or.. we'll do a better job

[vluther]

of not getting caught..

notice what's missing...

[the quick brown fox]

The words "admit", "regret", "apologize", or "sorry".

I want to give the JBoss folks the benefit of the doubt, and I'm sure many others in the Java/J2EE community want to, too... but they just keep making it so damn hard.

No Apology There - Saves 10M funding?

[fastdecade]

To save you some effort, here's a summary of Fleury's speech:

Introduction: I've been accused of astroturfing.

Middle: JBoss is great, JBoss rocks, JBoss has great developers
...
JBoss is King, long reign JBoss, love the JBoss.

Conclusion: OK, no more astroturfing.

Not once does he explain why it was done, but then he hardly even touches on the issue.

Perhaps a direct apology would see the $10M VC be yanked from under Fleury's schitzophrenic hands?

"Responsibility" without accountability: too easy

[Doc Ruby]

Presidents of countries, companies and other organizations have become fond of "apologizing" and taking "responsibility". But there's no accountability. JBoss's boss has confessed he ran a corporation which astroturfed, and why not? Once caught, their astroturfing was no longer as effective, and more expensive, so of course it'll decrease. But responsibility means response. Where's a real response to the lies spread by his propaganda corps? Running an American corporation, with its fundamental freedom from liability, what responsibility can he actually bear?

Still more options....

[njcoder]

This is just plain embarrassing and should have been responded to better.

Sometimes you have to admit you've done something stupid outright, which they didn't really do initially.

Kind of a historical trend for JBOSS. I find a lot of what they say misleading. The professional, in "professional open source" must mean something about heavy marketting as in talking a lot of crap weather it's true or not.

Just like the number of downloads as if that's a useful way of determining market share.

Also the big hype over Sun not certifying them. I'm sorry, it takes time and money to go through the certification process.... don't cry poor and then get 10million in VC money. Especially don't make up crap about how Sun doesn't want an open source j2ee server when it's really about money. Sun will certify any one that pays for certification and passes.

Speaking of which.... If they passed I'm sure I would hav eheard about it. Any one know if they ever got certified? Maybe all that yamming about being completely J2EE compliant and Sun just trying to hold them back was just that... talk.

It's a shame. Good idea, good way of implementing it with good training seminars (I hear), but there will be other open source options soon that don't try and diverge away from the J2EE spec like JBOSS does. A free, as in beer, J2EE server is already available that has passed certifiaction testing. Sun's own Sun ONE Application Server 8 Platform Edition is free to download, develop, deploy in production and redistribute. It's really stripped down to make it light and you can really only deploy one instance on it per server but for a lot of people that's enough.

Also, the Apache team has a much better history and more momentum as a whole. Geronimo will really be a big problem for JBoss.

Re:first post.

[k4_pacific]

Granted no one would implement a solution without trying it first. However, in all likelihood, they would be more likely to try it in the first place if they had heard someone casually mention it was good in a forum. The problem is that it is often difficult to distinguish against a real unbiased opinion and an astroturfer.

Re:"Responsibility" without accountability: too ea

[Otter]

Out of curiosity, what would you have him do? Seppuku? Pay people to download JBoss, instead of giving it away for free? Clean your refrigerator?

Laying down the law is easier...

[Anita Coney]

than following the law.

From the subject ot the post

[manavendra]

Now JBoss's CEO has recanted: there will be no more fake posts from JBoss staffers, he says

So that means he admits there has been fake posts - well at least that's an acceptance finally!

From the article...

[mikolas]

The practice, known as "astroturfing", is wildly popular on sites like Slashdot that actually let you post as "anonymous coward".

I think it is a different thing to use fake identities in order to make your product look better than it is and discrediting the critics than simply posting as anonymous. Anyone can take comments from an AC with a grain of salt, but occasional readers do not have the capability to understand that a person behind fake identity is essentially fake and astroturfing. I for one only realized what was going on on TSS only after some very specific comments from Cameron Purdy. Just one more reason to support Geronimo or Jonas instead of the "competing" offering from JBoss Group.

Re:"Responsibility" without accountability: too ea

[Doc Ruby]

He might fire someone, or at least publicly castigate them. Or he might announce some other amending action, like making his astroturfers offer some kind of service, on company time, to the forums they polluted. If he were smart, he'd apologize to the people who run those forums, and offer them JBoss software, or someone else's, and free integration. Then he'd get promotion, too. But what has he done? Nothing, except brag about how outspoken his company's people are.

Re:"Responsibility" without accountability: too ea

[Doc Ruby]

True - the slippery weasel (sorry, not you, "Otter" ;) didn't even explicitly apologize. He just made some excuses for bad behavior, then swore off it, starting with himself, without even offering to make his people stick to that policy. You're right: I was being *too generous* in even saying that he apologized.

Did anyone actually *read* his "apology"?

[Anonymous Coward]

From Fleury's letter : I personally don't need a mask to speak my mind and one thing I can't stand is two faced hypocrisy

Come on. This guy has been caught astroturfing and his idea of an apology is to deny the obvious and proclaim his distaste of hypocrisy in the same sentence!!!

We knew he was astroturfing, now we know he is a uber-hypocrit and a regular moron too.

Re:"Responsibility" without accountability: too ea

[Salamander]

That's an excellent example of treating a problem as a potential opportunity to create something positive. Fleury et al did something to degrade not just their own credibility but that of the forums where the astroturf occurred. They did harm to those forums, and the obvious way to atone would be to do something that creates positive value for those who were harmed. Offer to give them free software or services, write some free articles, give them some inside access to information about product roadmaps or benchmarks, pick up part of the bandwidth tab...whatever. That would be true atonement, in contrast to the empty non-apology that was actually offered.