Monthly Archives: September 2003

buzzword compliance

JBoss Boss to Geronimo: Fork You

There's been a lot of Java-based spin around the splintering of the team that developed the JBoss open-source Java app server this summer. Some of the developers on the core dev team for JBoss spun themselves off as The Core Developer Network LLC in August, reportedly unhappy with life under the JBoss Group flag. Then their access rights to the code versioning system were cut off. The result was a “fork” in JBoss' code–JBossGroup continues its development, and the JBoss team at CDN continues on a separate path, now called Elba (since JBoss is a trademark of JBoss Group's Marc Fleury).

Elba was originally intended (by the CDN crew) to be an effort to incorporate The Apache Software Foundation's Geronimo Project with the JBoss code; now, it's a placeholder (and source of revenue) for CDN while it contributes to Geronimo itself, independent of JBoss code. Geronimo is to be Apache's Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) server, which it hopes to certify with Sun as J2EE-compliant. The Apache Software Foundation is in no way connected to Elba–and wants nothing to do with it.

Meanwhile, The JBoss Group is trying, now, to get certified itself. Bob Bickle, once of Bluestone and then of HP Middleware (killed by Carly Fiorina post-merger), is now the VP of biz dev for JBoss, and he, as he put it to me today, “drew the short straw” to negotiate certification licensing with Sun. He says the the move was driven by a change in JBoss's user base (more actual deployments by businesses); others outside the company suggest that the real reason is to get certified before Geronimo.

Clearly, no love was lost in the breakup. Marc Fleury said to me today in a phone interview: “The two guys working over there (Geronimo) were mediocre guys at JBoss.” He suggested they were purged because they weren't up to the transition of the project to “professional open source.”

Standard
Administrivia, General Chaos

Translating Bush-Speak redux: The UN address unspun

My fellow…er, I forgot, you're not Americans.

Once again, I'm invoking September 11th in a transparent play for your sympathies. I don't know why; you folks here don't matter a hoot, really. But I've got to do something about my slide in approval, and I figure if I can get some of you to kick in for the bill on this Iraq thing, it might help.

It's sad that that guy from Brazil who worked for the UN got blown up. I'll say his name to try to convince you I care about the UN, and show off my Texican pronounciation of a Portugese name.

And the security council said that Saddam whatshisface was a Bad Man. So I really don't understand how you all could be so pissed at me for trying to blow him up and killing a couple of Muslim-speaking foriegners in the process. I mean, what gives?

I mean, you all asked “how high?” when I asked you to jump all over Afghanistan. And we've got some of your Kraut and Frog-speaking guys getting shot at in Kabul. So I really don't get why you aren't all over this Iraq thing. And, remember, I've carried the whole bill for those mercenaries from DynCorp to keep Karzai's ass from getting riddled with bullets.

Now I'm spending a shitload of money to pay Haliburton and Bechtel to build a new Iraq so we can get some of the oil we have coming to us after September 11 (I somehow overlooked the fact that Afghanistan doesn't have any). And I'm going to give you guys a chance to get in on the ground floor on this deal. All you have to do is give me some troops who speak something other than American, to make this thing look legit to the people who keep whining about how I did this without international consensus, whatever that means, and I promise I won't invade any of your countries for supporting terrorism.

I'll say a few things about some bones that I've instructed Congress to throw you, like AIDS research and relief funding that I still haven't spent, and that slavery law, er, anti-slavery law we passed to tax countries that still sell people. Really, I'm a good guy, and I'm looking out for you.

But God says I'm right, and I'll invade anybody who says otherwise.

May God bless America, er, y'all.

Standard