JBoss, a division of Red Hat, has announced the appointment of Bob McWhirter as the new technical leader for the JBoss.org open-source community.
McWhirter, who founded the Codehaus open-source project repository, will be responsible for evolving the technical infrastructure and content of the JBoss.org site for a growing community of contributors and users as well as an increasing number of open-source projects, he said.
JBoss.org generates over 30 million page views and half a million user sessions per month.
McWhirter, based in Ashville, N.C., also started the Drools project, an open-source rules engine acquired by JBoss in 2005 and now known as JBoss Rules.
McWhirter also founded the Jaxen project on Codehaus. Jaxen is a Java Xpath engine. In addition, McWhirter founded IT consultancies such as OpenXource and the Werken Company which focused on open-source development, and has been involved with various development communities such as BEA Systemss dev2dev. Most recently, McWhirter was a senior architect for Radar Networks.
“I watched JBoss over the past year shepherd Drools to an amazing product since the acquisition,” McWhirter said. “While its trendy to be snarky about JBoss, theyve been awesome for my project, its developers, and its community.”
Meanwhile, McWhirter said he would welcome discussion with any solid open-source projects that might consider joining JBoss.
“I can say that if any high-caliber project—Codehaus or otherwise—is interested in joining the JBoss family, Id be glad to do what I could to facilitate that conversation,” he said.
Sacha Labourey, chief technology officer at JBoss, said that McWhirter “brings technical talent, open-source passion and vision that will drive the JBoss.org community to its next stage of growth.”
