Maven Mavens Move From Mergere
Service and support company stopped offering service and support
May 15, 2007 —
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When Jason van Zyl originally released Maven in 2004, he wasn’t expecting to make money on his code; he simply wanted to improve upon ANT, the open-source build tool. Two years later, when he signed on to work for Mergere—then a new company from the creator of Gluecode that promised to support Maven users in enterprises—van Zyl was excited to turn his hobby into a paying job.
SONATYPE IS LAUNCHED
But six months ago, van Zyl set out on his own, disillusioned with the evolving business strategy of Mergere and its parent company, SimulaLabs. And last month, he drew the curtains back on his new Maven support company, Sonatype.
Sonatype is a bit like Mergere 2.0, with van Zyl and some other former Mergere employees concentrating on rebuilding the pieces that they felt Mergere bungled. Sonatype will offer service, support and training for Maven users, and will partner with industry vendors to build plug-ins and crossover projects to integrate Maven into the larger build process. Meanwhile, van Zyl’s former employer is changing its name and refocusing Mergere on building the pieces of a SOA stack.
“All along, the basic problem was people coming from a non-open source background and trying to work at an open source company. We ended up using [a book van Zyl wrote about Maven before signing on with Mergere] as a marketing tool, and not as an education tool,” said van Zyl.
As such, van Zyl is now working on another Maven book, this time with publisher O’Reilly Media. He said that, rather than using this one as a marketing tool, he’ll give away less-technical sections of the book online as a way to spark interest in the project, not just the company.
But the book flap at Mergere was only part of van Zyl’s problem there. “I was the figurehead. They wanted the founders [of Maven] to be involved, [but] ultimately, we didn’t have much control over the business strategy,” said van Zyl. “There was never really any product strategy. Walking around the conferences, you would always get the feeling people were a little uneasy” with what the company was doing.
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