Open sores scams
It’s funny how whenever there’s a whiff of money in the air, all the shysters and scamsters come out of the woodwork to try and make a quick buck. What’s more depressing is how often it actually works. Witness Marc Fleury, for example, or Gluecode’s sale to IBM.
The Java world has a good few companies like these, companies which don’t really offer much, but have somehow managed to waggle the open source penis sufficiently that others have thrown money in their general direction for a quick stroke and lick.
It’s delightful however to see that this particular scam doesn’t always work. Two brilliant examples that come to mind are Mergere and Virtuas.
For the unintialised, both of these companies have no actual offerings, beyond brand. Mergere has a fairly inxplicable business plan; to build a company around maven. Not the actual product, but the idea. Suffice to say, they’ve flushed away a ton of money down the toilet and gotten absolutely nowhere, just like I predicted a year ago.
Virtuas is a really special one though. The basic premise of Virtuas is….well, it’s hard to tell. They seem to have something to do with OSS, but what, nobody is quite sure. They do throw nice parties though, and I fairly gleefully drank their alcohol and wasted their food at various conferences. A fool and his money are easily parted.
The three ‘brand names’ that Virtuas has (well, had) are Jeff Genender, Matt Raible, and Bruce Snyder. Matt is famous for being the webmonkeyest person in Javaland. Matt to the average Java developer is what George Bush is to the well intentioned republican; an oafish figure that’s vaguely embarrassing, but that you can relate to on some level because he’s as dimwitted as you are.
Bruce jumped ship fairly early on to join a similar scam with slightly better business prospects, LogicBlaze.
Jeff on the other hand seems to have just left Virtuas to move onto bigger and better (and more commercially viable) things. How do I know? Well, Jeff had posted a superb blog entry airing some of fun stuff going on at Virtuas. Sadly, the article was yanked. I imagine the powers that be sent poor Jeff some mean letters that deprived the rest of us of his literary genius. The article wasn’t even that bad, but it did point out that Virtuas spent a ton of money, and achieved nothing whatsoever. Really folks, if you’re going to force someone to yank an article, someone somewhere is going to notice, and the negative publicity you get from THAT is likely far worse than if you had let the article stay and ignored it. After all, I wouldn’t be writing about what turdburglaring arsebandit chozgobbling pillowbiting chocolate log miners Virtuas are if Jeff’s original article wasn’t yanked.
I remember being aghast actually a year or so ago when I first heard of Virtuas. The word on the street was that basically, the principals had managed to scam some Indian fund (the native kind, not the Asian kind) and that they had, in effect, unlimited funds to spooge over and so could do stupid shit like throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at JavaOne parties that generated no income or leads whatsoever.
Honestly, when I hear about these people, I’m tempted every now and then to draw a big chart outlining all the incestuous relationships between all these companies. It’s like one of those mob charts you see in cop movies. We have Gluecode, which was headed by Winston. Winston has a Philippines based sweatshop where most of the coding is done. He sells Gluecode, and is immediately astounded at his own business acumen. He goes on to form Mergere and Logicblaze through some more money he’s scammed, in return for gobs of shares. The rest of the gluecode people disperse to one of those two companies or IBM. On the periphery are people like Bruce and Jeff, who go on to form Virtuas, but also to work on Geronimo. Geronimo uses a bunch of products which happened to be commercialised by Mergere and LogicBlaze. Employees between all of these companies seem to happily hop between them, with IBM at various points no doubt injecting money to keep the whole thing sustainable. Matt Raible grins idiotically throughout the whole thing.
Another brilliant example of the OSS marketing approach is Terracotta, who have recently open sourced their flagshit product. Now, let me ask you this, if you had a product that cost 10k/cpu, and you had a ton of customers, why would you opensource it? The answer is actually pretty simple. You’d do so if the loss of income from license purchases was insignificant, which is the case if in fact you DIDN’T have many customers.
Terracotta also has a fantastic burn rate. Fancy offices, highly competent developers that likely cost a fair few limbs, and one of the stupidest marketing plans ever seen outside of Virtuas. Ignore all the spin, the OSS gesture is a last gasp effort, which might or might not pay off. Don’t make the mistake of assuming it’s a choice they had to make; it was a choice forced on them to try and salvage something out of what they’ve built. Ultimately, choosing terracotta or coherence boils down to whether you are building toys, or enterprise applications, at least for the near future.
So do yourselves a favour and avoid all these companies, their shelf life is highly suspect, and they’re all a bit too blatant about trying to scam you.
December 26th, 2006 at 9:23 am
first
December 26th, 2006 at 9:23 am
First!
December 26th, 2006 at 12:06 pm
third…
Hmm, any chance to read this yanked Jeff Genender’s blog entry?
December 26th, 2006 at 12:45 pm
Way to go again, Hani. Go off on something that you understand about 10% of. Just for the record, there actually is and always was a business plan for Virtuas. Provide support and implementation services to organizations around open source middleware. Having core talent such as Raible, Dudney, Genender, Snyder and Goodwill gives companies confidence in using “been there, done that” people. Maybe people like you don’t get it, but Bank of America, GE, CNET, Boise Cascade and Northrop Grumman do. Good thing they are not marketing to you. Keep up the bad journalism. CBS would be proud.
December 26th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
If Hani says so bad things about them it means they have to be really really good !
December 26th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
Can’t say I’ve been to any parties or know very much about what good business/marketing is - but I have worked with the Virtuas guys on a couple gigs and have only seen good things.
They’ve known when to stfu and get things done, when to ask questions - and never done any weird scammy stuff with clients even when other consultants were attempting to do it left and right. (such as one instance where a jsf guy tried to get me to recommend total bs to a client manager in order to get himself more hours on the project…No I didn’t recommend whatever he was selling and really just wanted to punch him in the face.)
I guess you could say I’m just trying to protect people that I’ve got some kind of business relationship with, but what’s right is right…The Virtuas guys are the good kind of devs.(not saying they are all l33t hax0rz, just that I’ve never seen any of them bs’ing themselves/clients/anyone else …so at least they’re honest )
December 26th, 2006 at 7:07 pm
Do Bank of America, GE, CNET, Boise Cascade and Northrop Grumman approve of you giving out their names? I don’t see their names on the web site. What if those customers saw that reply? Funny thing with open source (and yes, I know plenty about it) is customers always refuse to allow their names to be used, cos they’re just plain embrassed to be associated with open sores.
December 27th, 2006 at 7:33 am
Hanni, if these people would abandon their infidel open sores beliefs and praise free software then we could fight the evil capitalists with the GPL.
GPL Akbar!
December 27th, 2006 at 11:13 am
Nice Entry Hani! I can’t keep from laughing out loud. But anyway I would like to make it clear to everyone(readers and Java developers) in order to prevent misconception about the Philippines, especially in the Open Sores scene that Gluecode may be generalized with the rest us is a wrong assumption. In fact, this “scam” is an exception, not the rule and has nothing to do with the rest of the talented Filipino Java Developers contributing to the real open source initiatives. This is in defense of the true Philippine Open Source Culture.
December 28th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Oh Jared my sweet Jared…
“the rest of the talented Filipino Java Developers”
You seem to have a hard-on attacking everything Winston is associated with. Hmm, I wonder why. I guess the Filipino sweatshop mentioned in the above article doesn’t have anyone of worth to the open-source scene? Condemning the employees because of the boss? Yeah sure, you know everything don’t you oh great all-knowing one?
December 28th, 2006 at 4:36 pm
Think they’ve got a legal gag on Raible which is why he is not responding here the way he usually does?
December 28th, 2006 at 8:06 pm
regarding the sweatshop:
fact #1: basic salary of their employees is just average (compared to other software dev’t companies in the philippines)
fact #2: all employees are REQUIRED to work AT LEAST 48 hours a week (note: no overtime pay here folks). can’t seem to think of any reason why they practice that, and they couldn’t give any acceptable reason either.
fact #3: given the amount of money winston got from the gluecode sale, you’d think that he could afford to get a more cozy office with nice furniture. i’ve seen their office, and it could be better.
December 29th, 2006 at 1:10 am
jared:
hopefully, to laugh at (loudly) at other Filipinos (or perhaps this particular Filipino) and to dismiss other Filipinos accomplishments easily (”scam” is a little too harsh, don’t you think?) IS an exception. and what is the true Philippine Open Source Culture? living and working in singapore? enlighten me..
December 29th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Hi!
All it is correct!
Respectfully yours!
January 1st, 2007 at 10:07 am
Hani, biting the hand that feeds IT. :-)
January 2nd, 2007 at 4:54 pm
sweatshop … hmmm.
I just interviewed with a company here in the US that has a 45-hour minimum week. No overtime pay, of course. The important thing is that most developers to whom I mention this say things like ‘Well, sure.’ or ‘Like always.’ Sometimes if I prolong the discussion I hear that ‘we are professionals - it isnt a 9-to-5 job !’.
Right - professionals. Because it is well known that real professionals - doctors and lawyers -regularly work unpaid hours for their clients.
(If you’re a software developer, that was sarcasm. Real professionals do not give away free work.)
Anyway, we all know the true story at that US company I mentioned. The real work week is 50-60 hours with random peaks due to crises thrown in by the management exploiting their spineless teams. Right ? Yeah, you know it.
There are all kinds of sweatshops … one of the emerging chestbeater habits seems to be the ‘non-sleeper’ behavior - you know, the lead who sends the team email at 12:45 AM and then is emailing the team for status again at 5:15 the next morning. The kind of dick who pretends that 7AM is a good time for the team standup … because the hours for 6 to 9 PM are more than ample to attend to the needs of your family and your personal health.
Don’t get me wrong; I like the software development business in general. But the work hours, which have always been suspect, seem to me to be getting worse in the last couple of years. Does that have anything to do with the open sores ethic of giving away your work ?
Probably not, but it may be worth considering that the guy doing this is not in fact a professional at all, but a naive young male working as hard as he possibly can - without pay - to make your job and his a clerical dead end … because sometimes people will Look At Him.
January 4th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
The only party I went to was the Geronimo one at JavaOne. The only girls there were the waitresses.
January 4th, 2007 at 4:59 pm
Mergere is a great example of all this.
Since they “became a company”, the maven people have accomplished almost nothing. Archiva is non-existent, continuum is there but dead in the water and the eclipse plugin is completely lame compared to what exists for NetBeans (a truly HORRIBLE IDE).
Now that they’ve gone completely insular it’s almost impossible to see any progress. Sad.
January 5th, 2007 at 6:21 am
Hani, you are getting slack. You should call Gluecode Goocode, Virtuas Virtu-ass and Mergere Mergerear. Does anyone know their ticker symbols? Got some cash to spend on shares.
January 6th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
terracotta couldn’t sell their products so they have to give it away. have you seen any clients on their site yet? no one will buy it cuz it don’t work
January 12th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Hani, thank you so much for this article. God, and to think I even considered for one moment doing any sort of business at all with the donkey dick licking shit-for-brains dicks at illogicblaze makes me as violentally ill to my stomach as a japanese porn actress after a long bukkake session.
Three weeks wasted on trying to get activemq to work only to realize the pile of monkey shit app doesn’t remove dead clients after the tcp connection is broken.
You know, transactional sessions, persistent messaging, fault tolerant brokers all matter a whole-boat-fuck-load of nothing when the broker gladly continues to deliver messages from a queue to clients that aren’t even fucking connected anymore. Way for “deliver-once-and-only-once” jms compliance you ass fuck terd for brain 2″ dick fuck mother fuckers.
I hate every single on of you pieces of shit and would love to break your 3″ necks after kicking in logic blaze’s teeth and pissing and shitting down its throat.
Thanks for wasting 3 weeks of my life fuck offs. Burn in hell, please. do the world a favor.
January 12th, 2007 at 3:42 pm
And furthermore, I get real excited when dealing with a company who’s answer to the fact that their software doesn’t work is to tell me to buy a support contract that is as fucking expensive as a god damned fucking license for a product that already is KNOWN to fucking work.
Yeah dick fucks. I’m gonna drop my pants, bend over, and pray that you DO ram some giant black stick into my ass and pray that maybe you’ll give the ol’ reach around….
January 21st, 2007 at 3:42 pm
hehe, it happened