So by now you’ve probably already read:
Progress Buy a Bridge in Brooklyn (Savvion BRMS) and make Del Boy Trotter Proud
And are thinking, this guy is a fruit cake…. Anyway bear with me as they were just tongue in cheek bits of fun. Sure, not so fun for Progress, who are gonna have customers reading this noise and thinking “WTF?”, but then that was the point 🙂
I’m just having a little bit of fun, at their expense, which is well deserved for such shockingly bad behaviour. So I would urge anyone else to join in and have some fun too 🙂 Do your own blogs, polls etc to bring attention to this.
And please vote up at Digg and DZone to help raise awareness:
http://www.dzone.com/links/progress_buy_a_bridge_in_brooklyn_savvion_brms_an.html
http://digg.com/news/technology/drools_progress_buy_a_bridge_in_brooklyn_savvion_brms_and_make_del_boy_trotter_proud
http://digg.com/news/technology/drools_breaking_news_progress_and_savvion_steal_candy_from_a_baby
http://www.dzone.com/links/breaking_news_progress_and_savvion_steal_candy_fr.html
Being slightly less tongue in check, this is just the reality of open source, I’ve been doing this a long time now and I know you just have to live with it, take the lumps with the smooth – as long as you get more smooth than lumps, it’s still worth while 🙂 At it’s best it brings people together who collaborate and help each other and enrich the open-source eco system. At it’s worst you have organisations such as Progress executing on predatory amoral tactics. The debate on whether all corporations are ultimately operating on degrees of amorality is out of scope for today 🙂 As each year goes buy you start to appreciate Red Hat more for the sterling work it does in open source. While it would be nice if Progress got involved and contributed to Drools, the reality is that this doesn’t bother me as much as you think it would, and I’m not throwing my toys out the pram. It hasn’t lestened the Drools community and technology, we still go from strength to strength, and I’ve always been more concerned about what we are doing and achieving than what someone else may or may not be doing with regards to taking advantage of our work.
Ultimately this is actually quite flattering and re-affirms the strength of our technology and the directions we are going. I’d rather have an organisation using Drools and moving it one step closing to being a defacto standard, than they partner with someone else or develop yet another rule engine splintering the market and confusing users. “Drools Everywhere” has alwas been my moto 🙂
However that said, anyone who knows me, knows I have a mischievous sense of humour and if Progress and Savvion aren’t even going to at the very least accredit us then they are fair game and surely myself and the Drools community deserve a little fun at their expense 🙂
Mark – The Mischievous Lead