So the WS/SOA blog community is upset that someone - Jean-Jacques Dubray, apparently- has slagged off Jim Webber in public. over a posting of Jim's.

Personally, I find it JJ's behaviour poignantly, naively funny.

Why? Because Jean-Jacques has just made a strategic error -criticising Jim W without doing his research. Jim and Savas spent years up in Newcastle, not just studying distributed computing, but surviving in a town where the post-pub activities from the locals includes picking knife-fights with strangers. In their last few years in the UK, the pair of them went to all the Grid Forum events not to talk about what they were doing, but to rip into everything that was being proposed -OGSI, WS-RF, the works. They'd let someone present their stuff, sitting quietly at the back of the room, then stand up and tear into it piece by piece. They'd sit at the back, as that way they got to shout their arguments -it made for better delivery.

It was always hilarious to watch. In fact, this is why I supported their work from the outset. It wasn't just that to anyone that had done functional SOAP stuff, most of what they were saying was obviously correct, it was that Savas and Jim were so aggressive about arguing their case that you were better off being on their side than that of the US grid architects, IBM, or any other large organisation. Because having the paper support of such large entities means nothing when you are in the same room as those two.

So far, Savas has responded. From what I recall of Savas, he's being polite. Either his stint at Microsoft has taught him sublety, or he's just warming up. Either way -this is going to be entertaining to watch.