Hey, JBoss? Two words: duhhhhhhhh
JBoss as an app server is fine, but sometimes its proponents are clueless.
(In fact, there are some funny stories about the incident: for example, Gavin King was shouting at me on my cell phone at a conference, where people could hear it even though I didn't have it on speakerphone or anything.)
We've talked about it, JBoss and I, since then... although the people who were there at the time are not the same as the people who are there now, since the Red Hat buyout. They say (legitimately) that I could have handled it differently; I'm a laissez-faire kind of person, though, so I figured posting it was an invitation for them to respond publicly.
Anyway, despite the buyout, the cluelessness hasn't changed much. On TSS, Bill Burke is routinely negative toward me - when I announced a new editor (and thus, my own transition away from TSS), Bill commented:
No more Java Sucks/Is Dead/Jumped the Shark articles? No more "Spring XXXX - it rocks" articles? No more Rick Hightower called in sick articles? What will I read every morning now? *sigh* Life just got a little more depressing...(To be specific: the "java sucks" newsposts were responses to people being stupid, the "spring rocks" newsposts were referring to epiphanies people had, and the Rick Hightower post was interesting, so I published it. He's referring to maybe eight posts out of three years on TSS. Most of them were submitted to me or pointed out to me by readers.)
More from Bill, from ANOTHER thread, just to illustrate the trend:
Cool, now that Joe is gone, maybe our article and news submissions won't accidentally be "forgotten" or "lost due to technical errors", but at the same time things are "lost" or "forgotten" find the time to post rants of a disgruntled ex-JBoss employee who hasn't worked for us in 7 years or Rick Hightower calling in sick. :)Even my leaving hasn't affected poor Bill:
As far as EC2, this may not be big technical news, but pretty interesting from a business sense. Joe seems to ignore our more technical news posts like the one I did a few weeks ago about JBoss "Black Time", our binary drop in replacement for Tuxedo, but that didn't make the cut for some reason...The interesting thing about this is that I quit TSS - as in, really quit TSS. I wasn't doing the news after I'd resigned. Never saw Bill's "black time" post... and I made a point out of posting JBoss news i saw as relevant. Always.
Anyway, one thing's for sure: JBoss submissions have picked up! They're getting more vaporware postings online, which I suppose is good for them - although people are going to learn that TSS is announcing vaporware and ignore some of the postings because of it. Along the way, though, the old JBoss animosities have picked up... and now we get to the heart of the "duhhhhhh" in the title of this post.
Rich Sharples pointed out that a lot of the JBoss committers are previous customers, as part of a challenge to Douglas Dooley. Rich... of course they are. That's a good thing, of course, because it means the JBoss community is open to listening to its users in the best possible way, but... I'm sorry, but "duhhhhh." Your users are naturally going to be the people who are most invested in your product, and are going to have the most expertise. They're the natural place to draw your committers from. This isn't worth pointing out.
In fact, I'm insulted that you did point it out. Why not add that 2+2=4, too? People might not be able to put that together, you know.
Like I said, it's good that you are using your community this way; it's definitely wiser than allowing people who'd rather have Geronimo succeed than JBoss as committers, and way better than having people who only know Visual BASIC on the client side as JBoss AS committers.
I suppose that might be obvious, too, but hey, you're pointing out the obvious, so maybe I should too.
Duhhhh.