After this morning’s surprise announcement that JBoss Group was essentially forking, there has been a lot of speculation about what this means for JBoss Group specifically and JBoss in general. The new company was started by 8 now-former JBoss Group consultants and was announced with much fanfare this morning. Ben Sabrin of JBoss Group just posted a “rebuttal” of sorts to the jboss-user mailing list. He took a few jabs at the departing consultants and made one statement that’s a bit hard to swallow. The jabs:

“…the most important developers are on board with JBoss Group.”

“WE have the financial resources to patch the departures of three consultants in our US consulting operation.”

and the dinger is

“It is business as usual and JBoss Group is currently growing.”

The statement that all the “important” developers are on board is an attempt to downplay the reputations of those who have left by implying that they were second string, while the second is attempting to indicate that the new company is going to be strapped for cash, probably to scare off potential customers. I have no personal info on either statement or situation, nor do I know if the developers in question are useful or not. From what I can tell, though, in reading the various articles about the split, the consultants who left all seem like integral parts of the team… I can’t blame JBoss Group for being ticked off, but these statements just strike me as a little smarmy.

The dinger is a dinger because how can you be growing if half of your consultants just left?

I think it will be interesting to see how all this plays out over the next several months. Will this lessen or increase the business use of JBoss? I actually think the potential is there to increase it because you have more options for support, but that’s just me.