Open sores scams

http://jroller.com/page/fate?entry=open_sores_scams

It's funny how whenever there's a whiff of money in the air, all the shysters and scamsters come out of the woodwork to try and make a quick buck. What's more depressing is how often it actually works. Witness Marc Fleury, for example, or Gluecode's sale to IBM.

The Java world has a good few companies like these, companies which don't really offer much, but have somehow managed to waggle the open source penis sufficiently that others have thrown money in their general direction for a quick stroke and lick.

It's delightful however to see that this particular scam doesn't always work. Two brilliant examples that come to mind are Mergere and Virtuas.

For the unintialised, both of these companies have no actual offerings, beyond brand. Mergere has a fairly inxplicable business plan; to build a company around maven. Not the actual product, but the idea. Suffice to say, they've flushed away a ton of money down the toilet and gotten absolutely nowhere, just like I predicted a year ago.

Virtuas is a really special one though. The basic premise of Virtuas is....well, it's hard to tell. They seem to have something to do with OSS, but what, nobody is quite sure. They do throw nice parties though, and I fairly gleefully drank their alcohol and wasted their food at various conferences. A fool and his money are easily parted.

The three 'brand names' that Virtuas has (well, had) are Jeff Genender, Matt Raible, and Bruce Snyder. Matt is famous for being the webmonkeyest person in Javaland. Matt to the average Java developer is what George Bush is to the well intentioned republican; an oafish figure that's vaguely embarrassing, but that you can relate to on some level because he's as dimwitted as you are.

Bruce jumped ship fairly early on to join a similar scam with slightly better business prospects, LogicBlaze.

Jeff on the other hand seems to have just left Virtuas to move onto bigger and better (and more commercially viable) things. How do I know? Well, Jeff had posted a superb blog entry airing some of fun stuff going on at Virtuas. Sadly, the article was yanked. I imagine the powers that be sent poor Jeff some mean letters that deprived the rest of us of his literary genius. The article wasn't even that bad, but it did point out that Virtuas spent a ton of money, and achieved nothing whatsoever. Really folks, if you're going to force someone to yank an article, someone somewhere is going to notice, and the negative publicity you get from THAT is likely far worse than if you had let the article stay and ignored it. After all, I wouldn't be writing about what turdburglaring arsebandit chozgobbling pillowbiting chocolate log miners Virtuas are if Jeff's original article wasn't yanked.

I remember being aghast actually a year or so ago when I first heard of Virtuas. The word on the street was that basically, the principals had managed to scam some Indian fund (the native kind, not the Asian kind) and that they had, in effect, unlimited funds to spooge over and so could do stupid shit like throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at JavaOne parties that generated no income or leads whatsoever.

Honestly, when I hear about these people, I'm tempted every now and then to draw a big chart outlining all the incestuous relationships between all these companies. It's like one of those mob charts you see in cop movies. We have Gluecode, which was headed by Winston. Winston has a Philippines based sweatshop where most of the coding is done. He sells Gluecode, and is immediately astounded at his own business acumen. He goes on to form Mergere and Logicblaze through some more money he's scammed, in return for gobs of shares. The rest of the gluecode people disperse to one of those two companies or IBM. On the periphery are people like Bruce and Jeff, who go on to form Virtuas, but also to work on Geronimo. Geronimo uses a bunch of products which happened to be commercialised by Mergere and LogicBlaze. Employees between all of these companies seem to happily hop between them, with IBM at various points no doubt injecting money to keep the whole thing sustainable. Matt Raible grins idiotically throughout the whole thing.

Another brilliant example of the OSS marketing approach is Terracotta, who have recently open sourced their flagshit product. Now, let me ask you this, if you had a product that cost 10k/cpu, and you had a ton of customers, why would you opensource it? The answer is actually pretty simple. You'd do so if the loss of income from license purchases was insignificant, which is the case if in fact you DIDN'T have many customers.

Terracotta also has a fantastic burn rate. Fancy offices, highly competent developers that likely cost a fair few limbs, and one of the stupidest marketing plans ever seen outside of Virtuas. Ignore all the spin, the OSS gesture is a last gasp effort, which might or might not pay off. Don't make the mistake of assuming it's a choice they had to make; it was a choice forced on them to try and salvage something out of what they've built. Ultimately, choosing terracotta or coherence boils down to whether you are building toys, or enterprise applications, at least for the near future.

So do yourselves a favour and avoid all these companies, their shelf life is highly suspect, and they're all a bit too blatant about trying to scam you.