Wenfeng li came to Actuate a few years ago and brought a huge lawsuit from his former employer. Then he acted crazily:

He proposed to recruit people from China after grabbing a lot of his old friends around him…

His multi million lawsuit partly forced Actuate to layoff several times…

Lately he start touting BIRT. The truth is that he has very limited knowledge and experience on Java technology and he doesn’t understand too much about Actuate product as well.

The only way he can do is to tout himself and add version number to praise himself…

Please draw your own conclusion…

Jim: indeed. i think we are indeed seeing the benefit of some of that early outreach. i know when i’d initially heard about the efforts to open source Solaris i - like many others - were concerned that it might be a chuck it over the wall type of effort. clearly it has not been.

now OpenSolaris clearly has its challenges cut out for it - as the difficulty in building it standalone indicate.

but at least you guys aren’t trying to go it alone.

Actually, in a very real sense that’s part of our community building strategy — to reach out to other communities who have already done this and to directly engage the various Solaris communities that have been out there all along. We are transforming a market into a community here, and along with that comes massive changes in behavior for everyone involved. A touch of humility is absolutely in order.

A year before we opened the project, we had the Solaris engineers going to a variety of open source, Unix, and Java conferences to talk openly about what we were planning. We had many informal (meaning non-NDA) meetings with leaders of many communities, and we were honestly looking for feedback. We couldn’t always do what we knew we should do, and we couldn’t always move fast enough to satisfy some people, but at least we felt were were moving in the right direction. We asked as many questions as we answered, too. Some people were shocked. Some didn’t believe us. But we just kept plugging away. We did the same thing with Sun’s Solaris installed base and with Solaris developers and system administrators — constant conversations among engineers. All of the most important data was collected personally by the kernel engineering team. And the more we talked the more confident we got in talking openly. The press missed this part of the story back then since we were so under the wire. But as I remember it, we basically told people pretty much everything we’re doing now. Very little was held back.

So, I think what you are seeing now is an extension of that early outreach effort.

Maybe some guidance by industry analysts on what folks in corporate America should specifically do internally (more important) and externally (important) to inject the notion of community into their own culture.