Tuesday, September 23, 2003

On the Pull of Solar Orbit

Will Sun finally make an honest app server out of JBoss? Why does the community care?

Bona fide, certified, sanctified, washed in the blood of the lamb...whew-ee, our heads are so big already, I'm not sure we could handle that kind of validation. But seriously, how did we go from "We do not know that app server, JBoss," to possible epithalamion? We may get to join the family. And what a warm cozy group that promises to be. They could even use the tag line from the Sopranos, "J2EE, family redefined."

Well, families stick together and that's apparently what's needed in this situation. That's right. Better toe the line, children, or Bill Gates will murder us all while we sleep. The restless eye in Redmond wants fresh conquests. How convenient it is to have our common enemy to trot out, in the interests of policing the heterodoxies within.

Like the traditional institution of marriage, this certification seems to hinge more on the exchange of money than technical virtue. And what is this money needed for? Marketing, that's right. Java needs to be marketed. Individuals praising their own product: bad, duplicitous, hubris. Vast anonymous corps of corporate marketing: truthful, good. Can I have fries with that? Will we see it on the Super Bowl? Cause we all know the real reason y'all went into Java programming. That's right, because Christina Aguilera thinks it's cool.

So, in return for paying out some lucre, we get to bear the official name. And what power naming conveys. When you think that by the simple act of re-naming things (as opposed to re-engineering, which sounds like a lot of hard work) you give them a new lease on life. Renounce Satan and all his works, be christened into the Java family and all the sins of your past life will be washed away.

But we've had so much fun being bad. Can our relationship survive communal sanction and legitimacy? Where will all the love and passion go?

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