So JBoss head Marc Fleury, on seeing three quarters of the JBoss vote in the JDJ Readers Choice Awards vanish without a trace, sent off a nasty-gram to JDJ editor Alan Williamson, who published it on his blog.
The JDJ awards are a joke anyway. For the big-ticket items (databases, IDEs and Appservers) they're basically a measure of market-share, as the majority of people work in a homogenous server environment, so they'll just vote for the one they work with the most. (With a few open-source or cheap nominees getting votes disproportionate to their usage because more people are exposed to them)
For the small-ticket items (books, tools, etc) the categories are so broad that they end up being apples-oranges comparisons.
I went through this year's poll a while back, and there wasn't anything I felt I could vote for, because I either didn't have enough exposure to enough of the nominated products in one category, or I couldn't make the apples-oranges choice in the other.
I fail to see what's wrong with a vendor saying "If you use, and like our product, go vote for it here!" If someone likes JBoss, they'll vote for it. If they don't, they won't. That's not rigging the vote in any sense of the word.
The only time it's a bad thing is when it's an employer saying "Vote!" because that generally means people are voting who don't use, or who are forced to use the product. So basically, this just rules out the (statistically insignificant) handful of JBoss employees as bad votes. Big deal.
Several commenters corroborated the story that the votes did vanish, although they were later restored. The fact that only a single product (JBoss) was affected is at least prima facie evidence it was a deliberate act. Online polls are notorious for being "adjusted", so the burden is on Alan to explain what happened. Rather than accusing Marc of lying, Alan should, perhaps, have checked his facts.
When 3/4 of the votes for your product vanish off one of the most visible polls in the field, you have a right to be pretty annoyed. Marc's basic sin was to ignore the "cooling off" rule of email - when you write an angry email, put it aside for 12 hours before you send it. Most of those emails remain unsent.
Posting private emails is very bad netiquette, but when it's a semi-official missive to a magazine editor from someone representing a product, it's hardly a private email.