JBoss “attitude training”
I’ve largely stayed out of the JBoss debate as I have some mates within JBoss and without. I’ve always maintained that – love ‘em or hate ‘em – JBoss is good for the Java community. It’s shaken up the Java space, provided an alternative application server and generally made the entire community stronger. It also provides an Open Source application server
Then again, putting my “Open Source” hat on I’ve always maintained that JBoss hasn’t been ‘open source’ – in the true meaning of the term to me – for a long time now. The code has an OSI license, but to me that’s only part of being a true Open Source project.
For example, commits are by in large only made by JBoss employees, JBoss “projects” don’t usually run outside of the JBoss sphere, there is a huge ‘not-invented-here’ syndrome about reusing external modules and the community as a whole I always find it to be almost the antithesis of open.
Note – this is not unusual – nor am I suggesting it’s a “bad” thing, it’s just something to be aware of. MySQL is almost exactly the same as a company.
What does amaze me though, is the constant “attitude” shown by JBoss employees. Here is the latest (but by no means isolated) example:
I suppose we can fork Spring and make it do what we want. But it is probably easier just writing our own. The IoC part in Spring is trivial to implement. The hard part is always integration with other services.
To me, this just reads as arrogant and spoiled. Why denigrate Spring? There is no need to. There is no need to. IoC in Spring is trivial? That just makes the commenter look stupid. It’s clearly not a simple thing.
I’m not sure if you can invest in corporate “niceness” training, but it would certainly be a good idea. More and more new JBoss employees appear and they all seem to be cut from the same cloth.
To me it seems the equation is simple – being nice doesn’t cost you anything, but the opposite certainly does.
