mergere, maven's crowning glory
I’ve gotten too many emails requesting this particularly hilarious entity be ‘reviewed’, peer pressure being what it is, I capitulated and decided to have a look at mergere.
Mergere, for those of you with better things to do with your lives than follow every ridiculous idea in javaland, is a new ‘venture’ where some VC type managed to con a bunch of maven developers into thinking they have the makings of a real product you could build a company around.
First, let’s even ignore how ridiculous the idea is, and evaluate this assertion based on the words of their own website. I’m sure that perusing it will make everything clear, and we’ll all think ‘aha! if only I thought of that!’
It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that whoever came up with the site content had nothing further from their mind. The site seems to have been written by a marketoid who once knew someone who had read a java tutorial. It promises us that the maven based solution stack will ‘eliminate most, if not all, human interaction at runtime.’ Now I’m no buildfile expert, but in all these years, I have perhaps come across one or two projects that require any human interaction between issuing the equivalent of ‘make’ or ‘ant’ to kick off the build process and have it spit out binaries of dubious quality.
The solution stack also, apparently, ensures that ‘builds run from start to finish without issues.’ As anyone who might have used maven knows all too painfully, this is about as truthful as claiming that swt is a great cross platform toolkit, or that bill berk is a great public speaker.
What’s even funnier is that these monkeys, like everyone else, are building a continuous integration tool. Perhaps there is a glimmer of hope here, as for some reason this field seems to attract the top tier of java retards; those who seem to have the shortest attention span and least ability. We have anthill (functional, but about as attractive as rod johnson’s moobs), beetlejuice (by Andy wannabethoughtwanker ‘if I rip off the jira look then I will be rich’ Pols, cute yet about as functional as a thoughtworker without a pair), damagecontrol (the only build tool I know of that can without fail bring down any machine it’s installed on, rock on ruby!), and of course, the perpetually dysfunctional cruise control.
On the plus side, the one place you can be sure of to run this pathetic pile of doggypoo is codehaus. Yep, the only people in the world stupid enough to run the most unstable and incompetently written build tool in existence (damagecontrol) will no doubt apply their highly selective acceptance criteria (it compiled, once) to this project, and deploy it.
I do feel some pity for the maven guys. They’re clearly a bunch of happyclappy clueless well intentioned oss hippie types who are being ruthlessly exploited into thinking they’ve achieved oss nirvana. You poor bastards are going to have a rude rude awakening in a year or so once your seed money runs out, and you’re back to whoring yourself on shitty little IT gigs and, no doubt, churning out more shitfests in the hope of ‘making it big.’
Of course, the business plan for anyone who has followed gluecode is blindingly obvious. Throw up enough smoke and mirrors to sell the whole thing off to someone even stupider. While that approach will obviously work with logicblaze (which compete with a number of commercial business friendly tools), I predict an astounding failure for mergere. Not only has nobody ever paid for this sort of thing, but there’s a delicious irony in offering commercial support services for maven too; any build tool that requires you to pay an expert to maintain is clearly badly written and should not be used in the first place. How many companies have made their name and money selling makefiles, or build.xml files?
July 17th, 2005 at 11:38 am
First post?
July 17th, 2005 at 11:39 am
I knew there was a reason I hung out at Codehaus.
July 17th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
What do Mergere and LogicBlaze have in common (except for the obvious i.e. being doomed) ? Both belong to Simula Labs, the open sores vulture partners. Surely IBM will buy LogicBlaze to replace WebsFearMQ with the world’s most scalable JMS implementation. And then they’ll buy Mergere because if they can convince enough candid clients to install the bloody Maven, millions of dollars in revenue can be expected for Global Services over the next 5 years and a new job category of “Senior Build Consultant” shall be created.
July 17th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
As the co-author of the #1 java book, you could argue that i am closest positioned to make a living off ant. But at 15,000 copies sold, it is clear that (a) no VC-funded startup can make a living off ant and (b) most people can do perfectly well with the online docs.
I think Thoughtworks may actually make money by getting cruise control to work, or by paid consultancy on how to ship projects roughly in time. If CC was easy to use out the box, then they wouldn’t be needed. Maybe that is: for an OSS project to make money on a commercial scale, it has to be hard to use and ship with documentation that is either absent or simply blatantly incorrect.
July 17th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
Luntbuild is a nice. Beats cruise control and other bozos.
July 18th, 2005 at 2:31 am
> but there’s a delicious irony in offering commercial support services for maven too; any build tool that requires you to pay an expert to maintain is clearly badly written and should not be used in the first place.
The irony is even bigger. For any open source product to succeed it has to be so badly written that it forces companies to seek support. Otherwise how can they make revenue? By selling T-Shirts and mugs off cafepress?
So the business plan would be to sell it to even “stupider” companies and milk them for support as long as you can. Stupidity interestingly is not so uncommon. So they may make a living after all.
July 18th, 2005 at 3:55 am
Steve: “for an OSS project to make money on a commercial scale, it has to be hard to use and ship with documentation that is either absent or simply blatantly incorrect.”
Stop the low-blow attacks against JBoss or I shall sprinkle you with my breast milk!
July 18th, 2005 at 7:17 am
Doesnt Andy work for thoughtworks?
July 18th, 2005 at 7:18 am
Andy Pols - wannabe ThoughtWanker?
He used to work for TW didn’t he?!
July 18th, 2005 at 11:35 am
How do thoughtworkers actually pair privately? Is there a book or cruisecontrol site about a TW wife speaking the truth? Are thoughtworkers really as good a pair as they claim to be? Or is it more like the “desperate life of a TW wife”?
Please speak up. We’d all like to hear!
July 19th, 2005 at 7:14 am
Open source support. Some people just like to have their hands held all the time. They sleep with a night-light on and walk around with their ‘lucky’ secuirty blanket from when they were babies. These are the same people that blindly believe every marketing scheme and all news articles. They believe that the anchor man/woman is more truthful than their local priest.
July 19th, 2005 at 1:49 pm
Tom, I thought your blog was going to be called “Tombo’s Hell”, so I went there to read it….what a disappointment.
It should be called “Boring, infrequently updated, blog”
Why did you even provide us with the link?
July 19th, 2005 at 3:19 pm
If John K. Ousterhout can start Electric Cloud, Inc
with build accelerator product, why it cannot be done with maven?
The same companies will by it.
July 19th, 2005 at 7:04 pm
ThoughtWorks is the best company in the world. I don’t know what your problem is. You probably flunked out of boot camp. You’ll never understand what truly makes TW great.
July 20th, 2005 at 1:27 pm
I think you’re losing your touch, Hani. You should have spent a full paragraph on the choice of the name “mergere”. Instead you don’t even mention it…
The use of this word in latin literature refers to it’s meaning, “To sink down, sink in, to plunge, thrust, or drive in, to fix in, etc.” Although, my guess is a marketing droid simply made the word up off the top of his head without realizing it has a real reference.
July 20th, 2005 at 4:04 pm
Muhahaha, have you seen how I’m all over the place on TSS, basically claiming middleware as mine ? Don’t I deserve a special report on the BileBlog ? Come on Hani, spank your berkyboy!
July 20th, 2005 at 4:08 pm
Do you know the difference between my ego and the Universe ?
Scientists are not sure yet that the Universe will expand indefinitely.
July 20th, 2005 at 4:11 pm
Mergere’s motto should be “Mergitur nec fluctuat”.
July 21st, 2005 at 12:30 pm
Anyone know how much venture capital was wasted on this boondoggle?
July 21st, 2005 at 3:37 pm
The crazy shit about Merdere is that on their truly pathetic web site, you look desperately for (gasp!) a “Products” page or even (OhMyGod) a “download” link. No such luck however! They don’t even give Hani a chance to download the bloody thing and post a (most likely positive) review over here. Shame.
August 4th, 2005 at 11:06 am
And of course Mergere, who want to be experts in supporting the ‘Java-based developer environment’, create their own Web site using … PHP.
I wonder if they build it using … uh, their products … which I am sure they have, although they seem to be as yet unnamed ?
By the way, I have Maven experience in a ‘Java-based developer environment’ on my resume. It’s been a hot ticket, for sure. The only thing worse than that experience was having Susan manage the build process.
But that’s another story.