I'm a bit saddened. If JBOSS was started as a
"software vision" thingie, that vision is probably
dead. If it was started as a "let's get rich"
thingie, the principles probably did, but now the
JBOSS "ship" is rudderless.
Only in the sense that I wouldn't anticipate
JBOSS remaining a product maintained and enhanced by
a highly motivated group of technologists, and so
would be reluctant to invest my intellectual
resources into its use.
In general, it might be, if Red Hat were "any old
Linux company" but Red Hat is in IBM's pocket, and
IBM's incompetence at small-company takeovers is
legendary. [I was at one such company, Whistle
Communications, where IBM's hamfisted imposition of
a deathly burdensome corporate culture on a small
dot com venture capitalized firm paralyzed all
progress with no perceivable end in sight, which in
turn drove all the engineering talent away in mere
months. I was one of the last three software
engineers to leave, because "talent" was a bit of a
stretch in my case, while a few of the other
engineers who departed pretty much instantly were
world-class talents, working as FreeBSD committers
and kernel designers/implementers in their spare
time. In that crowd, I ran missions for sodas,
mostly.]
I don't like companies buying other companies.
Pretty much, you get that if you take the
"Capitalism" option in choosing your form of
economic system/government.
Most of the time the products of the bought
company deteriorate and die.
True enough, but the other side of the story is that
being taken over is the _originators'_ dream. Any
stock options they might have given employees become
void, because the company never does an IPO, the
cash for the takeover is handed right to the
principles, the rest of the staff gets beans for
their efforts, and quickly, in most cases, depart.
To me, those constitute unethical business practices
in and of themselves, since the staff takes low pay,
typically, in return for hard work to make those
stock options valuable. When that hard work makes
the company valuable for takeover instead, some
other compensation should be given to those
employees, they shouldn't become victims of a bait
and switch scheme.
That the company may then quickly fold, or have all
remaining staff diverted to other efforts, because
the incoming management is clueless to make keep
working what the outgoing management first made work
is of no consequence to the now-departed principles,
who typically take their money and run off to
reinvest that money in a new venture.
It's a bit sad for the original company's customers,
on the other hand. I've received occasional
solicitations, for over a decade, for help
supporting a product, the Interjet I, which
IBM/Whistle failed to support for their customers
much past my departure, as the company's focus
changed away from the Internet appliance field and
toward web site hosting. This reference to me
happens just because Google gets hits on some of my
web pages that mention that "Internet appliance" by
name, not because I have some hot reputation as a
FreeBSD troubleshooter.
FWIW
xanthian.
