As a current JBossian, I'm embarassed by some of these comments. Yeah, sure, things aren't entirely peachy at RHT, but these comments do much more to hurt the credibility of individual JBossians than RH management and feed directly into Dave Rosenberg's "whack job" comments about ex-JBossians he's tried to hire.

As somebody who wants to leave, not because of RHT or the acquisition, but because I want to do something new, I'm not looking forward to having to convince potential employers that I'm not a JBoss "whack job".

I'd rather have these disgruntled individuals vote with their feet rather than burn bridges because their actions do have an effect on others than themselves. Be mature people!

"I'm not looking forward to having to convince potential employers that I'm not a JBoss "whack job"."

If you worked at JBoss for any significant length of time, you are most certainly a whack job. Get over it, and have fun at your new gig.

umm...would you really want Dave Rosenberg as your boss?!??? If so, maybe "whack job" is a good description ;-)

I think corporate culture is way more important than most people take into consideration - it's important whether you are acquiring a company or just accepting a new job. For example, I think Carly's biggest mistake at HP was not understanding the HP culture well enough before she started making big changes.

Stormy, I would agree...and innocent bystanders would have expected one OSS vendor to have a corporate culture similar to another OSS vendor....but typing that makes me realize how silly that statement is.

Who would think that two commercial SW vendors have similar corporate culture just because of the business model they employ.

I guess OSS isn't that different in yet another regard.

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that the JBoss of the past is dead. The good news is that the JBoss of the past is dead. It's a shame that Red Hat chose to demolish the old JBoss, as I was rather fond of the old JBoss. On the other hand, not everyone was fond of the old JBoss, so maybe the new version of JBoss will be able to go places the old JBoss couldn't. Although Red Hat completely destroyed the momentum of the old JBoss team, they are starting to turn things around and execute on their version of JBoss.

The new JBoss is surviving fine without the old JBoss people who have left. That's not to say that things wouldn't be better (or even much better) with them, but as much as open source is about the people, open source is bigger than the people. The code is free, and new people who are passionate about the code are joining in.

So, redhatified JBoss marches on, and the more fully assimilated JBoss gets, the more the Red Hat investment will pay off. A year from now, it ought to be really clear that JBoss was a profitable and wise investment for Red Hat. It might not be so clear that it was as good from the JBoss side. I'm much more concerned that the lack of non-enterprise use of Red Hat (Fedora) will be mirrored on the JBoss side with JBoss being very profitable but ceding the public battles to the ubuntus of the middleware space. That's a terrifying thought to this old JBoss person.