Jacek pointed me to this analysis of the Sun-JBoss conflict.

My resolution to this would surely be to go into the direction of 'third-party testing/certification'.

Only, my mind fails to see how this third party could be anything else then a consortium of *J2EE users* rather then the more likely thing in this industry: a consortium of (large) J2EE vendors.

Sigh, the cultural difference remains the issue I'm afraid. The real user-in-control way to do it would just be to develop the CTK's in open source. I've read about this idea before, together with the argument that it would add the advantage of competition helping out to solidify their interpretations of the spec: a BEA engineer would be able to have a specific test added to the set that makes the IBM Websphere implementation fail, causing a larger discussion on how the spec must of been interpreted...

Oh well, me guess the sheep called J2EE customers are nowhere near organizing themselves for this kind of action. These Users all rather like to believe they negotiated better license and support rates, or have a better performing support-pipe with VendorX then the competitor. We fail to see that as users we are in there together and the competition edge is not made on negotiating fees on commodity.

I remember sitting (by accident) next to Bruce Perens some 9 months ago when he proclaimed: "There is something really odd about how software-vendors in general (backed by the Big Analysts) keep on dictating what is on the industry's agenda. After all 90% of software build in this world is *NEVER TO BE SOLD*, but rather just build by internal IT to actually make some difference (which is not done by all of us buying the same boxes in the software-shop)"

So the analyst will ask: 'where does the 90% figure come from?' - Bruce just made the extrapolation of the number of workers on both sides: see, only 10% of software engineers out there work actually for these software vendors!

I wonder.How many dogs per sheep it takes on average to control the herd?How often are dogs just ran over by a stampeding herd?Is it countably safer in the middle of the pack? Or is that just a myth kept alive by a carefully placed bite now and then?How often are the dogs really there to protect the sheep from the wolves? And who gets accounted for the occasional mishap and loss anyway?

Might be pure altruism too: these sheep conspired to just start walking around in herds just so the shepherds and dogs of this world would have something to do with their lives.

8:20:39 AM