The JBoss Group forks

6:30 am -- I scrape myself off of Dain's couch and grab the laptop. Dain is perched over a cup of coffee, wearing his "code poet" shirt. My luggage and tripod are by the front door. On our way out to the car I ask myself "are we really going to go through with this?"

10:15 am -- I'm on a cramped 757 en route to San Francisco, one day before Core Developers Network truck-nukes the professional open source world back into reality. Dain is in the seat opposite me, playing Metroid Fusion on his Game Boy advanced SP. He gets to the fourth monster in the hour it takes us to cross the Rocky Mountains.

11:59 pm -- My entire first day in San Francisco was spent furiously writing code. We've been on for twelve hours and there is no end in sight. We've begun racing each other to the next CVS commit, cracking jokes at whoever gets stuck with the merges. Billy Idol is blasting in the Winamp.

12:25 am -- The London crew wakes up early and everyone decides to check out the CVS tree at the same time. The unexpected codeslide overloads our DSL line and our connection to the outside world goes black.

12:27 am -- After staring at the flashing red light for two minutes we remember the CVS server is in the room with us. We pull it together. Someone switches on "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and we get back to work. I realize there are two types of friends in this world. Normal friends and the ones you can code with.

1:32 am -- We got net. Solid green light on the router and cheers all through the room. We wire the London team and give them a status report. They respond back, relieved. They thought Atlanta pulled a pre-emptive strike. We instruct them to stay clear while we test, tag and push the final changes through to the practice server. I can't stop laughing. We're actually going to do this.

8:00 am -- Seven consultants for The JBoss Group publicly announced the immediate termination of their contracts and the foundation of their new company, Core Developers Network. Their charter "is to provide a commercial infrastructure to enable open source contributors to deliver their professional expertise to the marketplace, independent of their contributions to open source projects".

The JBoss Group has been forked. And I'm here in San Francisco to tell you about it.

Business to Business
In the corporate world, people come and go. It's the nature of the game. The JBoss Group has suffered losses before and come out strong. But have they ever sustained an attack of this scale? No way. Neither Sun nor BEA could have pulled off something this personally damaging to Fleury's company. The pressure that pulled them apart had to come from within.

The JBoss Group was never very large, and the numbers on the site skewed reality somewhat in their favor. Those illusions are over now. Today's exodus hit them hard. The JBoss Group's web site indicates a mere eight consultants are left in the world. Only Bill Burke, Scott Stark and Nathan Phelps remain in the U.S. Although he's the lead architect, Bill isn't involved with consulting. Scott is the CIO and while he runs a good number of the training sessions he doesn't do much consulting.

This means The JBoss Group is going to have a tough fight on their hands here in the States. Core Developers Network has a superior grasp on the CMP internals. They've got the entire Jetty crew. They've got the man who authored the distributed transaction manager and the JCA subsystem. Their early work heavily influenced the drive to AOP. They have an Apache Jakarta board member, which could make things very interesting. Their site indicates they're expanding beyond the JBoss horizon to cover a broader spectrum of open source J2EE software. Finally, they're driving home the distinction between "Business" and "Project".

Guerilla
Core Developers Network kept their cool all the way to the end. They flew under the radar and hit the ground fully formed. Their site already has a documentation subscription service, training dates on three continents and is painless to navigate. Their open letter shows a guarded confidence, a well-formed sense of identity and a strong desire to distinguish themselves from the antics of The JBoss Group. They're thoughtful, cautious and disciplined enough to keep a move like this secret while they form ranks. Their tone is courteous and each word seems carefully chosen. And, I watched them build an entire e-commerce site in a matter of hours.

Don't be fooled, though. This battle is far from over. Marc Fleury is an incredibly intelligent and resilient man. The JBoss Group will probably be around for a very long time. It is unknown at this time if Marc Fleury will kick Core Developers Network out of the JBoss project. This would indicate a change in policy for The JBoss Group--no one else who has left to work for a competing firm has been edged out. But then, noone else has made this organized of an effort.

This story is not over. There's much more going on here than meets the eye. How did this all begin? How long have the wheels been in motion for this launch? What are they planning next? How will Fleury react? How are Core Developers Network funded? How will this affect the technological future of JBoss? Will this drive the much-needed wedge between The JBoss Group and the JBoss project? Will AOP keep The JBoss Group in the game? I'll be attending JavaOne and JBossTwo here in San Francisco to try and answer some of these questions. µ