JBoss head Honcho Marc Fleury lays down a new law about Astroturfing in the aftermath of being accused of the practice without actually admitting it was done:
"You may have heard about recent charges in online forums that some JBoss employees, including me, were personally involved in anonymous postings on developer sites. The practice, known as "astroturfing", is wildly popular on sites like Slashdot that actually let you post as "anonymous coward". JBoss has the reputation as an in your face, straight up, tell it like it is company. I personally don't need a mask to speak my mind and one thing I can't stand is two faced hypocrisy. This has made us many friends and a few critics.
As you may know, the open source community would not be what it is today -- a real challenge to traditional software models -- without the strong opinions and outspoken voices of the developers. I myself am among these voices. But we do not always see eye to eye on the evolution of the open source movement. Some prefer subsidized open source, whereby they work corporate jobs and contribute/moonlight on the side. Many others, including us at JBoss, prefer the "Professional Open Source" model, whereby it is our job to work on open source and free software all day long, all the time. We all passionately believe in the standalone potential of professional open source. JBoss' growing traction in the enterprise market, our expansion of products and services beyond the original JBoss Application Server and our recent funding from VCs have intensified scrutiny on our community and company, for good and bad.
JBoss is transitioning as a company to deliver on our commitment to make open source a safe and viable alternative for companies such as yours. We have hired the most talented developers - many of whom are innovators and lead developers of popular open source projects. We provide them with the means to continue developing and support these products while creating value for our community and wealth for themselves. As a company we are growing rapidly to meet the expert professional services needs of our customers and partners. We want to be role models for open source developers around the world. To do so, we must hold ourselves to a higher standard. Our visibility and success puts our customers and partners in a situation where you expect and demand that employees of JBoss Inc. hold themselves to that higher standard. Let's put the professional back in professional open source. "Astroturfing" is hereby banned at JBoss, starting with me.
Sincerely,
Marc Fleury
Founder, Chairman and CEO
JBoss, Inc."
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Re: JBoss Boss Fleury: No More Astroturfing!
(Score: 1, Insightful)
by Anonymous on May 21, 2004 - 02:59 PM
Maybe instead of a PR piece, he could have actually been a man, stepped up, took responsibility, said yes we _did_ do it and were caught and we are sorry that the upper management felt the need to organize an undercover smear campaign against our competitors. But the Open Source world is becoming exactly the same as big corporate America - deflect and deny, deflect and deny. What a load of crappy platitudes.
Personally, I used to think JBoss was the best alternative to Closed Source Middleware, but I will now be actively promoting other projects that are managed and run more ethically and with a better attitude towards those who don't buy the documentation or the "approved" book.
Re: JBoss Boss Fleury: No More Astroturfing!
(Score: 1, Troll)
by Anonymous on May 21, 2004 - 03:29 PM
He didn't apologize, admit astroturfing is unethical, or explain that they did it because they didn't think they would get caught.
How is "two-faced hypocrisy" connected with sleazy posting practices? Are you arguing that it's hypocritical of others to criticize you because you would have put your real name on the posts, lies and all? Uh..
Astroturfing?
(Score: 1, Funny)
by Anonymous on May 21, 2004 - 03:34 PM
I promise not to Astroturf anymore.....
Signed,
Re: JBoss Boss Fleury: No More Astroturfing!
(Score: 1, Interesting)
by Anonymous on May 21, 2004 - 03:36 PM
This is an entirely inadequate response and the Open Source community should demand more. This rah-rah memo has basically two phrases about what has been proven to be a long (over a year) standing, widespread practice at JBoss, a slap in the face to those that were attacked over that period by JBoss personnel using fake, purportedly product neutral identities. After JBoss upper management was caught in an organized smear campaign against their competitors, deflecting the blame towards slashdot AC postings is an escalation of the dishonesty.
AC postings have _nothing_ to do with what they were caught doing - they were caught posting using faked identities, one even made the mistake of registering their fake account using their corporate email address (presumably because he had to receive the account confirm email to activate his fake account). AC postings can be taken with the necessary grain of salt, reducing their efficacy as a PR tool so JBoss was not doing that. Instead they built identities specifically for the purpose of having more credibility when posting than an AC would have when slamming the competition and praising JBoss. With as conniving, mean spirited, well thought out and thorough their dishonest campaign was, you would think they could put some time and effort into the response to it now that they were caught.
Here is what I think is a good summary of what should be forthcoming from Marc and JBoss:
These are the kinds of things that if we let people off the hook, we will find that FOSS will have lost any moral high ground that it now has and the movement will sucked down into the same ethical morass that the multinational corporations inhabit.
More lies and cheap PR
(Score: 1, Insightful)
by Anonymous on May 22, 2004 - 01:17 AM
You can't put out lies with more dishonesty. Instead of bigging up how good your company is and how professional your developers are perhaps you should have just
Admitted you engaged in the practice, both personally and your employees
Apologied to the community for the posts you made
Resolved to remove all those posts from the sites that you polluted
Put in place a plan of accountability to anyone in the company doing it in the future
Do all this without trying to boost and PR yourself and your people
Re: JBoss Boss Fleury: No More Astroturfing!
(Score: 1, Funny)
by Anonymous on May 24, 2004 - 01:21 PM
JBoss totally rocks, it's the greatest computer program ever written, and I agree with the JBoss Group that they're the smartest programmers in a generation. Not only that, their ethics are beyond question, and they're kind to kids and puppies.
Re: JBoss Boss Fleury: No More Astroturfing!
(Score: 1)
by pendraco on May 24, 2004 - 02:36 PM
I first discovered JBoss back when it was "EJBoss" and used it well into it's pre-3.2 releases. I actively promoted it to others, including to my students while an EJB instructor for Sun! I included it on my list of "must haves" when canvasing my client's for contracts. Yes, I was a big fan of JBoss. I even supported it with subscriptions to their "on line" documentation sets...
Though, this last was out of "necessity" as much as it was my desire to support a quality Open Source project. The one thing JBoss has always "lacked" since it dropped 'E' from its name is a "quality" administration and assembly/deployment tool... and, JBoss is FAR from being easy to set up and configure. Quietly, I put up with it, saying to myself, "maybe I'll write one, some day". Yet, I always harbored the nagging feeling that perhaps JBoss' difficult administration and preponderance for non-uniform configuration files was "by design" to promote sales of documentation and consulting...
Then ObjectWeb's JOnAS matured, and ObjectWeb itself proved to hold itself truer to both the ideal of J2EE implementation -- including a robust administration console and deployment tool suite -- and to the spirit of "Professional Open Source". It took little convincing to switch... both, being fed up with the JBoss "Core Developers"' prevalent "better-than-thou" attitudes (as usually seen in forums, lists, et al; this latest tripe from the "JBoss Boss", case in point), and my JBoss docs sub. having finished.
Now "astroturfing" to promote themselves and their product... JBoss, the product, may very well be "Professional Open Source", but JBoss (Inc.), the company, is certainly not "professional".
Not only will I no longer promote "JBoss", now I will also staunchly recommend against it!
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