If I were running the JBoss project, here is how I would have announced my reaction to the announcement of Apache's J2EE project, Geronimo:
JBoss welcomes the competition from Geronimo. We wish the Geronimo team luck: developing a J2EE implementation is a lot of hard work. Today, however, the only option for a stable, production-quality Open-Source enterprise Java server (albeit not yet J2EE certified) is JBoss.
Here is what Marc Fleury actually said, in the jboss-news email that arrived in my inbox yesterday:
First a bit of history. I offered EJBoss when it was 4 month old to Apache. The guys at Jakarta vote OK unanimously and their vote was overridden by Brian Behlendorf. The reason from behlendorf was that they 'were not the dust bin of open source projects'. I heard the Apache crowd got offended for me calling them "a bunch of fat ladies drinking tea" at a later date when they were running around telling us how to run our project. We had reports that this was the non-official reason for this "challenge". Challenge accepted. More seriously as we overtake them in corporate penetration and business model, I guess they are finally looking beyond the HTTPD C codebase and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
We are the real thing, all we have so far is talk and announcement, announcements are a dime a dozen. Apache code on this project has yet to be released and then production reached and then maturity bla bla bla.... [then some stuff about JBoss not being involved in the project]
Somebody put a gag on this guy please?
Update (2003-10-10): Amusing semi-related commentary from Nathalie Mason-Fleury.
Sounds like that guy has some serious "coolness" issues...
Just like the school yard. All it is missing is a group of people standing round yelling "fight, fight, fight, fight"
Probably learned it from Theo de Raadt.
"If I were running the JBoss project..."
Hmm, why aren't you running it then? Don't have what it takes? Not enough talent? Not enough charisma? No balls?
"If I were running the JBoss project..."
Don't want to be rude but there's a light year of difference between people who say "If I was doing this... " and those that say "I am doing this...". No need to gag anyone, he made it to where he is by being who he is. More power to him. Respect.
There is also a world of difference between professionalism and his child like behaviour.
Konstantin,
Why respect someone who can't even construct a gramatically correct sentence, let alone lead a project?
Sure, JBoss has pulled some interesting technologies into play, but they have done anything but build well documented code base. It is a shocker.
I think i can understand Marc Fleury.
The Jakarta people got donated many good projects from outside and they had nothing else to do then to wreck the last stable build they got and let the project fade away. The only things going in on in projects like BSF or Slide are coding-political discussions which lead to nothing while new and interested members on the mailinglists mostly don't get answers on their questions.
They should seriously consider on which projects they want to concentrate before they produce even more useless code.
best regards, andi
Brett,
As a non-native English speaker I do not judge people by their ability to construct grammatically correct sentences in this inferior language.
Konstantin, basically what you are saying is alright. But stating that English is a inferior language is only ok for people who are able to correctly spell their own name.
if only he was called fx...