Progress has recently ripped off the Drools community and has offered nothing in return, not even a curtesy nod of accreditation for our hard work.. 30% of that 49mill USD would go a long way to helping us invest in our tooling which would benefit all of us :) and maybe the Drools team can have it's next team meeting in Hawaii and pay for all the community members to come too. Cocktails anyone? :)

http://blog.athico.com/2010/09/progress-buy-bridge-in-brooklyn-savvion.html

I'm just having a little bit of fun, at their expense, which is well deserved for such shockingly bad behaviour. So I would urge anyone else to join in and have some fun too :) Do your own blogs, polls etc to bring attention to this.

http://blog.athico.com/2010/09/breaking-news-have-your-vote-on-what.html

And please vote up at Digg and DZone to help raise awareness:
http://www.dzone.com/links/progress_buy_a_bridge_in_brooklyn_savvion_brms_an.html
http://digg.com/news/technology/drools_progress_buy_a_bridge_in_brooklyn_savvion_brms_and_make_del_boy_trotter_proud

Being slightly less tongue in check, this is just the reality of open source, I've been doing this a long time now and I know you just have to live with it, take the lumps with the smooth - as long as you get more smooth than lumps, it's still worthwhile :) At it's best it brings people together who collaborate and help each other and enrich the open-source eco system. At it's worst you have organisations such as Progress executing on predatory amoral tactics. The debate on whether all corporations are ultimately operating on degrees of amorality is out of scope for today :) As each year goes buy you start to appreciate Red Hat more for the sterling work it does in open source. While it would be nice if Progress got involved and contributed to Drools, the reality is that this doesn't both me as much as you think it would. It hasn't lestened the Drools community and technology, we still go from strength to strength, and I've always been more concerned about what we are doing and achieving than what someone else may or may not be doing with regards to taking advantage of our work.

Ultimately this is actually quite flattering and re-affirms the strength of our technology and the directions we are going. I'd rather have an organisation using Drools and moving it one step closing to being a defacto standard, than they partner with someone else or develop yet another rule engine splintering the market and confusing users. "Drools Everywhere" has alwas been my moto :)

However that said, anyone who knows me, knows I have a mischievous sense of humour and if Progress and Savvion aren't even going to at the very least accredit us then they are fair game and surely myself and the Drools community deserve a little fun at their expense :)


Mark - The Mischievous Lead