The BileBlog

This talk was fairly disturbing. The whole thing seems to be one big giant apache fapfest as conducted by none other than captain one hit wonder, Jason Hunter.

Jason is, it turns out, a deranged opensores lunatic. He’s not just drunk the koolaid, he sounds like he’s been receiving koolaid enemas as well as injecting it intravenously for quite a while.

For example, he thinks that it’s ‘cowardly’ for companies to consider their source to be part of their IP, and if they ‘really wanted to compete’, they’d hand over the source and then compete!

He then talks through the trials, tribulations and motivation behind writing JDOM, and as expected, it basically boils down to ‘it makes me look cool’, so take that Cedric, more ego-driven opensource! The anecdotes are all about going to interviews and saying ‘I wrote the book! I wrote the api you’re using!’

To his credit, he does proclaim that the GPL is the ultimate evil, with its sick ‘fuck you all! This is MY code and you can’t do diddly squat about it!’

To be fair, the talk is a good overview of some of the issues surrounding opensores and the various licenses and models involved, even if it is from the one of the enema eager crowd.

Unsurprisingly, it all goes horribly wrong in the end. Jason totally loses it and puts up a slide of ‘guidelines for open source projects’. This list has absolutely nothing to do with open source, and it’s pretty offensive how he’s managed to hijack a bunch of common sense guidelines (use a source repository! Have mailing lists! Use email instead of meetings!) and somehow make them open source specific issues rather than standard stuff any project should employ.

The delusions continue in full force shortly thereafter, where Jason proclaims that there are more talks about Jakarta projects than JCP ones. I don’t know what conference you’re at Jason, but the only Jakarta project that has its own talk is Tapestry, which all of 3 people use. Contrast that with a talk about the JCP, twenty nine EJB3 talks, a JSR168 BOF, JSR208, JSF, and a smattering of random open source crap that is most definitely not in Apache (always by deliberate choice, given how broken the Apache committee and voting schemes are).

Some more drug induced gibberish comes out later, where we’re told that the JCP should accept every proposal submitted to it, without any consideration to existing solutions that might already fulfill that need. Basically Jason thinks that the real world is insane enough to build an industry around the zoolike loonybin model that is apache.

Really, I must say I was quite surprised. You’d think that at a talk like this, it’d be a lot more even handed and representative of ‘the other viewpoint’, rather than how childishly naive and simplistic it actually turned out to be.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 4th, 2005 at 7:08 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.