It's funny because I thought Marc Fleury was a jerk. I was also a jerk at the time. We didn't get along at all. He also ended up making about $500m+ on our hard work when he sold to RHAT. Not to say that he didn't work hard, but if it wasn't for Tomcat and our work to popularize Servlets, JBoss might not have ever existed or been as successful.
Many many years later, he and I ended up as very good friends and he's still a lot more wealthy than I am or probably will ever be. I simply ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ off his far greater wealth to my own karma of being a jerk at the time. I also stopped being a jerk. =) A good lesson there for sure.
I recall most people thinking Marc Fleury was a jerk. But the whole Enterprise Java(tm) scene around 2000 was so scummy, starting from Sun on down.
The OP is a huge deja vu in its tone, too, immediately bringing to mind the awesome millenium industry innovations of J2EE(tm), big metal application servers, Enterprise JavaBeans(tm) (transparent RPC!), XML based everything, Sun Certified bullshit, and so on and so forth. God what a crazy time that was.
It enriched quite a lot of people, including myself. It was really great to see a whole industry revolve around our very early efforts. Very few people know about those early days and what really happened.
Many many years later, he and I ended up as very good friends and he's still a lot more wealthy than I am or probably will ever be. I simply ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ off his far greater wealth to my own karma of being a jerk at the time. I also stopped being a jerk. =) A good lesson there for sure.