Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » JBoss gets a new community lead

February 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)

JBoss gets a new community lead

TAGS: Open Source

You'd think that things like this would get lost in all the shuffle of being acquired and selling to enterprises and what-not. But no. JBoss just announced a great new community lead: Bob McWhirter, the founder of Codehaus (and co-founder of Drools, which JBoss acquired last year). Community was always one of the strongest attributes that JBoss had, an attribute largely driven by Marc Fleury.

Community, as I've said before, matters. Bob agrees:

JBoss is of course one of the pioneers of the professional open-source model. In that, we can never forget our open-source community roots, even when vast sums of money are thrown around. Ultimately all open-source survives and grows based upon goodwill. Tending to the community is required, else you risk alienating your own users.

As he states it further in the same post, his job is to enable people to participate in the "community continuum" to the maximum extent that they wish:

For those who think that a "community liaison" job is just about evangelism and saying nice things to people on forums, you need to join the 21st Century of software (and attend OSBC, where we have a great session on this very topic). Community is not just conversations. It's also code, as Sacha points out on his blog:

Bob and his team will further build JBoss.org infrastructure so that our community can enjoy increased productivity. That not only means better tools but also more and better automation (downloads, QA, automated build, statistics, etc.).

Good community requires good community infrastructure. One of Bob's principal tasks is to ensure that code facilitates the JBoss conversation, and doesn't stand in its way.

Welcome aboard, Bob.

Posted by Matt Asay on February 7, 2007 12:18 PM

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