An Open Answer to David Berlind

I recently had the (pretty sad) surprise to discover a part of a private email of mine published online. It was in David Berlind's blog (David writes for ZDNet). People go a little too fast with these blog things... They sometimes forget good ol' rules of courtesy :)

As the writer of the email to David, I'd like to publish the whole original mail as an open letter now. Here's the message I sent to David:

"Dear David,

while reviewing press coverage about ObjectWeb, I saw this paper: http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1374
"JBoss' Marc Fleury 'welcomes' IBM and Gluecode to the open source J2EE party"

You write:

"The other two open source J2EE players — ObjectWeb's JOnAS and Gluecode — are barely blips on the J2EE radar. JOnAS, which is the app server that's packaged with Red Hat Linux, can't even claim to be a J2EE server because putting the J2EE brand on a Java application requires special certification — something JOnAS doesn't have yet."

This appears to be blatant misinformation. JOnAS was certified for over 3 months when the paper went out (see http://jonas.objectweb.org/, http://www.objectweb.org/phorum/read.php?f=25&i=88&t=88, for instance). It's sad to see that JBoss communication policy is based on rant and deceptive statements. Although we respect all viewpoints, we cannot accept to see deceptive information about ObjectWeb propagated in the press.
I'm at your disposal to organize an interview with you and ObjectWeb officers, so you could hear for yourself what ObjectWeb is achieving, including J2EE certification, international development, etc.

Best regards,"

So Marc did not propagate misleading information about ObjectWeb/JOnAS. It's a relief indeed, because I don't have a problem with Marc. He does his job, he does it pretty well, and I like his French accent (although his is much lighter than mine!).

The fault was David's:
- David's blog article stating that JOnAS is not certified yet, is dated May 12, 2005.
- First certified version of JOnAS was available and announced online on February 14, 2005.
- First stable certified was available on April 1, 2005 (not an April's fool though).

You do the math.

So what's the point here? A mistaken statement appeared online? This is not the end of the world. What I asked for was the opportunity to explain the situation to a reporter, so that this reporter could better understand the reality of the situation, and at the end of the day do a better job (informing his readers).

The arguments that David presents in his second blog article tend to demonstrate that he cannot tell today whether, at the time he published his first blog entry (May 12), the available version of JOnAS was certfied or not. If he had checked before publishing the entry on May 12, he would have known then, he would still know today...

I'm gonna send a (private) email to David, to let him know I blogged about this affair. Be prepared to see the (private) email I'll send him published online anytime :)