DISCLAIMER
: None of the people mentioned below (Marc Fleury, Bob Lee, or Bill Burke) have given permission for me to post this. However, I’ve gathered material from two sources who choose to remain anonymous, and pieced together various other bits and pieces from stuff that is publically available. I’m sorry to those involved for airing your dirty laundry, but such is life. All the facts mentioned below are, to the best of my knowledge, accurate.
I realise a lot of this is old news to many people, but I’ve just pieced together the pieces and it makes for quite a fascinating story. I must admit that as someone who dislikes Marc Fleury, I’m perfectly willing to concede that he is in all likelihood a somewhat functional human being. The trail of JBoss AOP however makes a compelling case for him in fact being a deranged psychopathic lunatic, who is a danger to himself as well as those around him.
It was the winter of 2002. The world was just learning to get on with it, terrorists were lurking everywhere, and christmas was looming where believers and unbelievers alike had to put up with having to see relatives yet again. The bileblog at the time was but a twinkle in the eye of its illustrious author, and java developers everywhere enjoyed casual tugging of one another’s genitalia.
Bill Burke decides that it’s time to nail down the JBoss 4.0 requirements (December 4th, AOP on JBoss forum). We see our hero, Bob Lee, happily chime in, with offers of help and advice. In fact, he said ‘Let me know what you want to do, and we’ll do it.’.
At the time, Bob had written jAdvise, one of the AOP framework frenzy pioneers. This made him somewhat of an expert and a valuable resource. Bob is now involved in hashing out the details of JBoss AOP, and is providing a lot of ideas and contributing to the project. Bill Burke seems to have regular conversations with Bob about JBoss AOP. Even the mighty Deranged One chimes in with a ‘welcome to the group bob :)’ on Jan 16th 2003.
Of course, this early harmony was destined to be shattered. Sadly this is often the case with psychopaths. Bill Burke takes the jAdvise code as-is and checks it in to the JBoss CVS tree (exhibit A: CVS History for Interceptor), aimed tremendously by Bob’s innocence and naivete in not specifying a license. You can look there right now at the javadocs for org.jboss.aop.Instrumentor and org.jboss.aop.Advisor, both have bob lee as the author (at some point, his @author tag was removed, and later restored). Suddenly, JBoss AOP has actual code and is no longer a case of a couple of guys masturbating in their parents garage. What’s even funnier is the very first CVS commit message for Instrumetor from Bill: ‘crazybob’s stuff. Great stuff. Actually works, unlike the Javassist reflect package’. A later cvs commit message is even funnier: ‘Also added LGPL license and fixed authorship comments’
The next step in this whirlwind tour is TSS Symposium, which is coming up. The wise old men in charge of TSS decide that they must journey far and wide to the corners of the land to find he who holds the most info and Knows Stuff Best about various topics. Who was the AOP luminary selected? Yep, you guessed it, none other than Bob Lee. He shows up and talks about jAdvice, a talk made all the more relevant by the fact that it’s become the framework that the fleury clan has chosen to rip off for their own plans of world domination.
Bob is invited by TSS to speak at the TSS Symposium. The topic is JBoss AOP. Now, Bob isn’t a JBoss employee. However, he certainly knows his AOP. He also certainly knows his JBoss AOP, given that at the time, the only code in said AOP framework was his. It’s not too surprising that he’d be considered somewhat of an authority on the subject.
Now, I can’t see into the mind of the psychopath, but it doesn’t take a genius to see how it functions. I’d imagine the JBoss collective as a whole was furious with this selection. Not just gets-angry type of fury, but a full blown oh-my-god-I-will-burn-your-grandmother-and-defecate-in-her-skull type of fury. Why the hell should some kid get all the credit for AOP, when it’s clear than it’ll never get anywhere without JBoss? Who the hell does this twerp think he is, talking about stuff that is now clearly owned by JBoss? Will someone please think of the children (otherwise known as PR and advertising spots)?
Later on, Bob suggests to Bill that they collaborate on a book on JBoss AOP, given that they know more about the subject matter than pretty much anyone else. Now despite my personal bias, I’m still unable to quite see why this is considered an insane request by the JBoss clan. Marc at this point is on the verge of kidnapping Bob and torturing him by forcing him talk to Nathalie for hours on end as punishment. His rage isn’t even the fun stuff we see in public, it’s downright scary. His opinion is (caps not mine) ‘ YOU WANT TO FUCK ME OVER BY WRITING A BOOK ABOUT MY STUFF WHERE WE GET ZERO DOLLARS I WILL MAKE WE DESTROY YOU SO MUCH YOU NEVER THE LIGHT OF DAY AGAIN.’
The spastic one also then insists that nobody will ever, EVER be allowed to write books on JBoss, illustrating his point with his usual verve and eloquence ‘YOU DON”T WRITE ON JBOSS’ (note the double quote, indicating the use of fist-of-fury on the shift key).
So there you have it. Of course, this is all ancient history now. These days Marc is no longer allowed to communicate with the outside world before Nathalie vetting anything he has to say (thankfully!). Bob Lee has moved on beyond the first generation aspect framework business and has just released dynaop (I hate AOP, but if you like it, dynaop is pretty good). JBoss users however still adore their fearless leader, and incredibly, actually take pride in him. What a sad sad world.
