Maison Fleury

So Larry has caused another splash in the press, in time for RHT's earnings call. Basically, Oracle has released a list of companies that "allegedly" have switched from RHT's "real RHEL" to Oracle's "magical mystery RHEL". Funny thing is, Larry spoke of Yahoo! as a switcher on a earnings call and Yahoo! quickly denied the rumor. How embarassing, but if it makes you feel better, Larry, I have been there too :) It may be true, I know from experience that big IT shops do not like to be referenced, not for tiny JBoss and, apparently, not even for big mighty Oracle. Whatever the case may be, this strategy of dipping one's toe in the water and declaring victory reminded me of another "successful invasion" supported with "faulty intelligence" where we are constantly reminded of "how we are winning, but "we need to send more troops to consolidate our winnings, because, you know, we are winning". See picture for h...

cause you know they missed us the first time! and the second time! Someone had tipped me that big news were coming out last night at 12PM PST. Well, I went to bed tickled pink and my brain wouldn't let it go and had to ring an alarm at 4AM. I fell out of bed at 4:35 AM because of a dream where I was reading news relating to JBoss. I mean, CAN'T I GET A BREAK? I am retired for gadsakes! I am not supposed to dream and wake up about these things. Talk about post traumatic stress disorder! So anyway I went in google news and typed JBoss and all that came up was this article "IBM takes aim at JBoss" in computerworld. Basically IBM generously "donated" porting code, to port from JBoss to Geronimo and websphere. What? I freaking woke up for that? Shucks, I woke up for irrelevant crap. I am going back to bed. The article even says "IBM bought gluecode in April'...uh yeah... April 2005 was it? It seems like eons ago. That bit made me think I was looking a...

The fun never stops. One blogger seems to grok the gist of the trademark situation . Even Darryl Taft goes for Maximum Noise , comparing RHT to MSFT in its tactics. As the blogger above states 1- it is perfectly kosher, and in fact recommended, to defend your trademarks 2- there are ways to go about it. As webbink, the RHT legal counsel, said, apparently someone in his org decided to "get tough" and send innapropriate letters on his own accord. Do not assume malice where incompetence will do. One of the positive things to come out of this "debate" is an increasing awareness of the issues of trademark. As Sacha Labourey points out in the Darryl interview, people get confused with the sense of "community". Because we share source code people assume we share everything. The word "share" is close to my four year old twins understanding: share means what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine too. I remember arguing vividly with my first lawyer...

The latest spat in JBoss land is here . With a guy named "Bill Dudney" all panicked because he thinks he can't give consulting on Hibernate because he has recieved a letter from RHT lawyers telling him to cease and desist using a certain collection of words to describe his offering. See a nugget of sanity in the thread by webbink. Ok so at JBoss we enforced copyright as the law intends: You can offer training on Hibernate or JBoss, but you have to be careful how you call it. The problem is not that you DO IT, where you can go wrong is in HOW YOU CALL IT. You can run afoul of trademark law. NOT OKAY: "Hibernate training" or "JBoss training" (unless you are RHT or an official partner). That what most people mean when they say "you can't give Hibernate training", they mean you can't give a training branded "hibernate training". OKAY: "My Training for JBoss Appplication Server" or "My Training for Hibernate ORM...

DISCLAIMER: this is the opinion of me myself and I. I do not represent JBoss, RedHat, do not speak for Gavin, Sacha, and the armies of legal experts from Raleighwood. Jense, Maher. The good: Kudos on giving back the modified LGPL code. It seems that is all that was wanted of you and required of you by the license. The bad: That it had to happen after a public spat is unfortunate. Makes everyone look like mad dogs that can't agree on simple licenses?. The not so pretty either: that late post about David, goliath and all that googeblidddeboggk. Dude, give it a rest! All you really needed to say was "my bad, the todo sheet was under an old pizza that I found yesterday and it took us 15 mo to do it. It smells of dirty socks but hey it is done. Peace, we are clean now, thank you, good night". Click! you turn off the light and leave without making TOOO much noise. Instead the post is delusional... again. Look between us girls here. I know how percieved competition can height...

You may have caught the announcement of JBoss and Exadel going to market together around an open sourced (LGPL) tooling platform. The new frontier is the new web development frameworks and tools. Tons of innovation going on in the market. With the proliferation of standards, a unifying framework, rich in widgets and programming models is sorely needed. There are many of them but none really dominating. The race is still WIDE open imho. This deal, Exadel open sourcing at JBoss is a good thing for both parties and *gasp*, whodathought, a good thing for the web development community in general. Only large proprietary vendors could afford to integrate their offerings, finally we have a pure opensource offering in the making. It will bear fruits in the short term by helping boost sales of the JBoss subscription, it will help the JBoss developers and contributors by minimizing the moving parts when it gets to tooling their innovation. It will greatly help RedHat customers by giving them one...

There is this great line in the for kids animation movie "flushed away" where "le frog" (voiced by Jean Reno) tells "the toad" to "give it rest, cousin" referring to his self-destructive obsession to get rid of the rats. I was reading Mark Shuttleworth's blog recently, in order to get to know the guy a little bit better. He founded "Thawte", made a fortune from that, went to space in a russian shuttle and dates models in the UK. He is smart, motivated and very popular. More recently he is the driving force behind the highly visible Ubuntu Linux distribution. There is a great series of a dozen posts on his blog on the topic of making Linux (read Ubuntu) ubiquitous on the desktop. To me it was yesterday's news. Then yesterday there was a thread on slashdot on that very topic and whether Ubuntu had finally arrived on the desktop . So I decided to dig a bit. The pictured is checkered. Many reports say it is there and easy to instal...

argh, Green Peace is denouncing monsanto for supposedly hiding data that proved that genetically modified corn is harmful to rats livers . What a PR heaven for GreenPeace. They get to go after GM food and after corporate greed all in one fell swoop. But see, this is exactly what rubs me the wrong way. They better have solid evidence before playing "fear tactics" in the press. Religious fundamentalists and extreme environmentalists share the same hatred of genetic engineering. Both appeal to a transcendental force we are not supposed to experiment with. How very dark ages. GM food remains ones of the most promising 21st century technologies to feed the planet but let's paint it as evil. I much preferred Green Peace when they were protecting seals and whales, the feel good stuff.

Picked this up in the news release: http://www.computing.co.uk/itweek/news/2185511/red-hat-promises-double . Basically in an interview, a RHT exec claims they will invest double (supposedly from the existing RD budget?) in the JBoss division. Yay! that is GOOD news and long overdue. Whatever the reasons for this (I will not presume to speak for RHT, as I wish they would return the courtesy) this has been something that I and other JBossians strongly lobbied for. Who cares how it came about, the big picture is that it is a promise in print, in time for the next earnings call and this is 110% wonderful news for the JBoss division and shareholders alike. I am sure the developpers will be happy to see some meaningful progress in their daily lives. Finally we can get going on the tremendous potential for the JBoss division's contribution to RHT's bottom line with a real investment in its future, a future of continued commoditization of layers, esp. the middleware SOA layer. Alleluia...

Picked this video from Slashdot coverage. http://video.google.nl/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645 . This was a talk done by 2 Subversion developers. They explain how to manage OSS and get rid of annoying people in your OSS project. Having run in this situation many many times I was curious to hear what they had to say. I think they cover the "volunteer OSS" angle very well. I found myself smilling at many of the examples they gave as we found many similar examples at JBoss.org. I thought, however, that their coverage lacked the dimension of"Professional" OSS (POSS)management. Some things that seemed to puzzle these guys were dealt in a straightforward manner in POSS. They talk about the irrelevance of some discussions of details. When the topic was mostly a matter of taste (emacs vs vi, windows vs linux, red vs blue!) people would quickly degenerate in religious debate because there was no right answer for it. These discussions can suck a lot of time and are, by...