At the very beginning, things were easy: we just had a single web site, jboss.org, which was both our community and business facade. It was easy in the sense that we didn't have to discuss much about "what content would go to which Web site": everything would end up landing on JBoss.org. This had the the side effects of frustrating developers with
flashy training banners left and right and upsetting architects unable to sell
the greenish JBoss.org web site to their CIO.
Some time after, we have been "offered" to buy the JBoss.com domain to some "parking service" company. It took us some time to accept the offer. Essentially, we did it only once we could really afford it (it was a high-quality "parking service", that's expensive). That's when we started spending a good amount of time thinking how to split content. But this really was a new birth for JBoss.org: it meant we were able to fully leverage this domain for community content. It is also when we started to move away form Sourceforge.net to get better CVS performance/reliability and build our own "JBoss Forge" to unify projects looks, navigation, tools (fisheye, SVN, etc.) This work was started by Damon Sicore who recently left us for an (almost) unknown startup.
Enough history, here is the good news : Bob McWhirter joined Red Hat and is the new JBoss.org lead. As you might know, Bob was the founder of Codehaus, a "high-energy" community/forge that focused on high-quality projects rather than on a high-number of projects (Codehaus is to project forges, what Blancpain is to watches). I've first met with Bob about one year ago when Drools joined JBoss: you might not be aware of it, but Bob was also the founder of Drools (aka JBoss Drools) - now led by Mark Proctor.
Bob and his team will work on several aspects of JBoss.org:
- JBoss.org Forge: 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.).
- JBoss.org Content: technical writers will produce useful material for the JBoss community and peer with project leads to make project pages useful and attractive. Mark Newton, based out of London, and previously a top-gun JBoss consultant, will bootstrap that team.
- JBoss.org UI: work on JBoss.org UI, navigability, ease-of-use, etc. This area is led by James Cobb, based out of Atlanta; we've started to offer this expertise to individual projects (JBoss Portal for example).
Bob will also be the public face of JBoss.org and will advertise and promote our projects, make sure people understand how we work as a community and make sure new contributors feel welcome in our ranks. Remember that we only hire developers from the community (mostly JBoss's community), so if you are interested to work for JBoss (or want to see how it could be), feel free to join our FOSS development teams (you can join even if you are NOT looking for a new job ;) ).
Welcome Bob :)
