What a week in the press. In case you missed it, we got the lead in the cover story of Investor's Business Daily (IBD) on their OSS coverage. It was a high to pick up the well known business newspaper on Wednesday morning getting on a plane and seeing my name plastered in the middle of the first page. The first paragraph curbed my enthusiasm "It's easy to see why Marc Fleury's numerous enemies accuse the 37-year-old CEO of having a god complex.". So it is now official, 1/ I am 37 (I will be on Nov 22nd) 2/ have a god complex. The real downer though was my picture on page 7, I look like a retard, a smiling retard. Oh well, I am not complaining :)

The second article in IBD on thursday (part Deux) was very interesting. It contained interesting quotes from both Chuang at BEA and Mills at IBM. Mills comes out of the gates with a flaming endorsement of JBoss and MySQL as real competition. If you only have time for one article read that one as it is a great summary of FOSS's impact on the field. IBM likes Linux but doesn't like mySQL and JBoss, what is so surprising about this? Well what is surprising is that IBM is pushing FOSS, when they meant to be pushing Linux. This has nothing to do with loving OPEN SOURCE but rather with pragmatic business competition. When Linux helps them fight MSFT, it is a cudly penguin but when it comes to their own turf well... romanticism be damned, the boys from Armonk mean business.

The big product announcement of the week was SEAM. There was great coverage on SEAM starting with this article by Darryl Taft. We briefed Darryl on a exclusive basis and he did a good job of capturing what SEAM was about. I don't know how Darryl does it but he managed to find 2 guys that don't like us :) one is a staunch detractor for the past 2 years, the other an ex BEA executive, he he. I want to correct one thing in Darryl's article. SEAM is all open source. Most people in blog-land got it right though, which proves that blogs are still a valid source of information when unbiased. Gavin was showing me all the blog coverage and we had a good time reading it. Too many to link here but I want to thank all of you for the coverage and fair evaluation. We are as excited as you are about SEAM and we want the SEAM community to grow up fast. SEAM is here to deliver RoR style productivity and we believe a merge of the component models from the front end to the back end is well over due. We want to be pushing this at a standards level and we will need the support of the community to get this through at the JCP level. Community enthusiasm around a product is the most gratifying thing, I am happy and proud for Gavin and his team, a big score and a big project being launched, this one will be for the ages.

We will be at Jboss World Barcelona in 10 days from now. I know I will see many of you there and I relish this opportunity. We also have BIG NEWS COMING AT JBW. I think it will surprise many in the community to see the direction we are taking and the seriousness with which we are executing on our plans. Be ready to be surprised :) The truth is that today, Jboss is a much different company than it was even a year ago. We were at 70 people and still young, today we are 150 people and it looks like a corporation in action. The level of talent in the organization is high and more importantly, pervasive. From my direct executive team of seasoned and talented professionals to the rank and file in sales or support, Jboss is not your run of the mill startup. I am proud of the fact that Jboss is one of the best places to work at in the software industry. I am proud of the caliber of talent we are able to attract. Taking a SEAM off the ground or really challenging the big boy like we are doing is possible because WE ARE STARTING TO OPERATE AS A REAL FIRM.

But I want to save the best for last :) But actually just a teaser because I will not say anything except that we GOT SOME DYNAMITE OF AN ANNOUNCEMENT COMING OUT ON TUESDAY MORNING. That's right, I am chuckling under my breath when I think about it. The big-ness of it, the beauty of it, the surprise of it.

It will get the attention of mr Mills at's for sure!.... Buaaahahahahahahaah

Watch the news on Tuesday. Right here, same channel. Go get the popcorn! entertainment ACOMIN'

marcf