This morning we’re announcing that Marc Fleury has officially joined the advisory board of Appcelerator. If you don’t know, Marc Fleury was the founder and CEO of JBoss, which was acquired last year by Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) for $350M.
Marc and I met around seven years ago through Ben Sabrin. Ben had just joined JBoss as the first non-founder employee and I had been using JBoss and Ben and I did business at his previous company when I was CTO at eHatchery.
My first run in with Marc was a classic marcf email from him, just after Ben had joined, threatening me because I had
setup a sourceforge project called VBoss. He was concerned that I was encroaching on his trademark and was glad to let me know I couldn’t do that. I told Ben that he could tell Marc to “pound sand” and that the project in fact was complementary to JBoss and I intended to add some voicexml capabilities to JBoss. I also told him that I really didn’t care what he thought. So much for first impressions.
Not long after that I worked on a set of remote networking capabilities in our core product (at the time, we bundled JBoss at Vocalocity) which we needed for machine-to-machine communications. This later officially became JBoss remoting and part of AOP remoting, EJB remoting and JMS remoting capabilities in JBoss. Marc invited me to become one of the early core developers of JBoss although I was not an employee. I got to know a lot of really brilliant people at JBoss in the core group and became friends with a number of them. Marc was also generous and I received early JBoss stock as part of my contributions.
Marc has become increasingly involved and excited about what we’re doing at Appcelerator. It’s been good seeing him in the office each week and it’s been a pleasure working with him on a number of strategic activities we’re engaged in. Marc has a real knack to take something extremely complicated and boiling it down to a simple set of messages. I’m also excited because Marc seems to be back to his old self and seems to be enjoying life a lot more lately. I’d like to think that Appcelerator and the team are a part of his new found joy. Marc generally seems excited about working with us and helping out and I must say – he’s back in his groove.
When I heard the comment from Marc the other day: “dude, i invented the friggin open source. ever heard of it?” I knew he was back. (if you have never read Fake Steve Jobs, this was a play on FSJ’s ipod slogan).
Our team is very fortunate to have Marc advising Appcelerator and I am very pleased that he’s been willing to spend part of his semi-retirement time to help us build our vision.
marcf, welcome aboard and remember, we love you.
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