BLOGTRONIX LAUNCHES... THE LAUREL AND HARDY SHOW

Some amusing drama goingon at AO. Blogtronix, Vassil Mladjov's new company, launched and announced on AlwaysOn. If you visit the post, you'll see an example of a Laurel and Hardy show where he had his colleagues post and try to knock down Drupal and open source platforms:

"finally something more reliable. those drupal and some other FREE solutions ....(free, some other time, not to use the right expression connected to the lower part of human's back....).. they just do not work, anything on open source platform that has over 1000 bloggers or users is so bad that it is not even funny. Where do i get the trial though ....."

Why would they do such a thing? Because him and his developers in Bulgaria were the initial team to build the GoingOn platform. Wisely, Tony wanted to test their abilities before fully committing so he asked them to clean up the AlwaysOn system which had a messy backend. A two week promise became two months. I was guessing since they only new .NET that they were learning how to work in a PHP environment on the fly. They didn't perform and Vassil made a couple critical mistakes, so the relationship was severed. Obviously, they were not happy.

This is where I lose respect for Vassil. He could have just quietly launched on his own, but he goes and announces on Tony's AO site and he includes criticisms of Drupal and open source platforms, which he knows that we are building on. Dude, why? Just launch and be happy. You don't go pissing in someone's backyard and start to bite and pull hair, which is how I see his and his colleagues posts. Especially since they lie about Drupal, PHP (which is what the AO site is written in and they couldn't code in), and open source in an obvious attempt to put fear or concerns about our platform. Totally picturing Mike Tyson biting Holyfields ear right now.

Anyway, I actually wanted to give the Bulgarian team another chance after they couldn't optimally perform on the AlwaysOn site, but did some information gathering. One source was Carl Wescott, Marc's partner and interim CTO of GoingOn, who operates very objectively and knows something about building stable and scalable systems (i.e. CharlesSchwab.com). He said there were red flags for him since the AlwaysOn site was down for whole weekends which didn't make sense. Carl said longest a live site should be down for upgrades or correction is an hour or so. He assumed they didn't do enough testing before taking the site down, which reflected a lack of certain skillsets.

So in his immature fashion, he announces on AO and takes stabs at Drupal, PHP, and open source. I've posted here before, it cracks me up when grown men act like grade school kids. Actually, many people never grow up.

Anyway, we're very happy with our development team who built the Ourmedia site. Our CTO, Carl, is stud and so are our lead developers, Ashish and Gaurav, who kicked ass at Microsoft (they know something about .NET and are happy with Drupal:) and left to found Tekriti Software.

MORE. Roland Tanglao's a post on Vassil's comments:

"Pure FUD. Perhaps Vassil doesn't realize that 1000s of companies are happily using LAMP and other open source solutions for their blogging and business networking needs without fearing the integration bogeyman. In 1999, companies were wary of using open source, in 2005 it's a no brainer."

Which I would add and did on the AlwaysOn site in response to the first quote above:

"i dont' know where you get your information, but it's wrong and seems purposely misleading. please place your propaganda on some flaming chatroom not at AO. ourmedia, which was built on DRUPAL has over 30,000 users and it works well on cheap hardware and zero IT support. also Friendster (you know Friendster, right?) has over 19 million users and it runs on LAMP very smoothly."