Good riddance, Marc Fleury.

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

Well well well, it's no surprise to anyone, but Marc Fleury has left the building.

Good fucking riddance, that's what I say. Regardless of what he did or didn't do, he certainly made out like a bandit, and I for one, like many many others, am very irritated (and jealous) about it.

Ultimately though, Marc achieved very little that is concrete. It's very debatable whether JBoss' success had much to do with him. Certainly, it did succeed, and a lot of people got conned out of a lot of money to make it happen, but such is the way of the world. The credit due it is more a matter of timing and of being the only OSS player in the field at the time, not that it's a great product or was particularly suited for any given task. Witness the abysmal failure that is Geronimo, a product that is arguably better developed, yet the world at large doesn't give a flying fuck about LGPL vs Apache licensing. Thus Geronimo remains a laughing stock and a head-scratching cautionary tale of OSS gone insane (not to mention that it's owned by IBM, and has developers that are about as capable of developing a product as Sun is of marketing one).

What Fleury contributed to the world of Java is a personality; love him or hate him, the man certainly deserved to be hated. His incoherent ramblings, the perplexing capitalization, the weak and tenuous grasp of the English language gave us all a lot of ammo, and made for some very entertaining drama.

The fact that he's also a shady, dodgy, and thoroughly despicable scam artist also helped tremendously. Who can forget the great astroturfing story? It's nice to see a company bigwig who will get his hands dirty, and openly misbehave in ways that one only expects particularly handicapped children to.

So sure, it is one less personality in Java land, but it's one we're all better off without. A testament to how bullshit and angry penis waggling can get you all the material success you want; it's a depressing lesson for any hopefuls to learn, and shows that even in this most technical of fields, a good con is just as easy to execute as anywhere else.

I wish him failure in his next endeavour, whatever that may be. Here's hoping that the cosmic balance is finally restored and the justice is served by Bad Things happening to him.

My one wish though is that he'd stop blogging. His blog is so painful to read that I have yet to complete a whole entry. It basically consists of him ranting in his usual incoherent style about whatever happens to have crawled up his ass and died that day. Now, I of all people am quite appreciative of aimless degenerate ranting, but for the love of god, have a care for the poor English language! I don't know how much of a second language English is to that man (though judging by his style, it might be more like a distant third), but can someone please explain to him that randomly capitalising sentence fragments is not a literary tool? It's like trying to read with someone punching you every few seconds; you eventually decide you're better off chewing your arm off than letting some random schmuck repeatedly hit you for no apparent reason.

Even funnier though is the army of JBoss sycophants who comment. You have Andy Oliver still struggling for relevance; nobody has told the poor bastard that he's as much of a nobody as anyone can be, and that it's not 2004 anymore. Random other JBoss halfwits chime in with their inane tuppence, presumably in the hope of garnering an acknowledgment from their divine leader, perhaps in the form of an incoherent collection of words and punctuation directed in their general direction.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the thread discussing this on TSS however is Bill Berk claiming he has 15 friends. How on earth did that happen? It's probably him astroturfing again, the reality is more likely to be that he knows 15 people who smiled politely at him as he frothed and mumbled his way through a sentence, as they tried to pointedly ignore his nipple tweaking in an attempt to gain their attention and approval via a well aimed squirt of moobjuice.