March 30, 2003
JBoss' friendly community banter, or people on the internet
I was curious tonight to see how the JBoss community looks like, so I went off for some casual browsing of their email archives. They sure have "some different style":http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102934985700001&r=1&w=2 out there. Looking at "how this project is evolving":http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524 towards a model where "a few key people":http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=html&op=userdisplay&id=team will be (hopefully) happy, and some of them, the _JBoss Group LLC_ members/shareholders, I reckon, (hopefully) "rich":http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/030325/255339_1.html, I'm not so sure whether JBoss is the community I'd like to live in. Then again, why am I blogging about it? ;-)
Andy has been doing his usual devil's advocate "blog":http://linuxintegrators.com/hl30/blog/general/?permalink=Miss%20Bla%20and%20her%20love%20for%20Marc%20Fleury%20or%20OpenSource%20is%20all%20about%20the%20Benjamins.html&page=comments about it, discussing a bit with "that female programmer":http://freeroller.net/page/chiara/ everybody wants to be seen together with (guess what, it would be really funny if she discloses within 2 days that she really is a 45 year old male doing a massive "perception-is-reality":http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/archives/000523.html scam). It worries me to see Andy using the 'proof your statements' discussion style in the comments on that blog, while he has been pretty quick himself in extrapolating his own context towards a global trend (don't we all sometimes?) - coincidentally designing his own reality for which no proof must exist.
All-in-all, I find it tiresome, having sometimes to pierce through a layer of style verbs, to find out about the real message. This blogging thing too, is often more about style and discussion tricks rather than information and content. When Andy explains at length he's not as abrasive IRL, I'm pretty sure that actually means he spends less on style, and more on content, of which he has plenty to offer. Ditto for that girl, for MarcF and Rickard, and many, many more, including myself, I fear.
I had the luck of encountering "Rik":http://users.skynet.be/rikvanbruggen/ several times in the last few days. We had this recurring meme that people should be able to self-relativize. It's hard. Andy is right, most of the times, but his style is kind of obfuscating.
*Update:* fun reads in the TTS forum thread:
* "http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524#78057":http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524#78057
* "http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524#78110":http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524#78110