Been a long time since I blogged, but I’m not apologizing for that. Just been too busy with customer consulting lately. Besides almost everything has gone to Twitter for me anyway.
Anyway, I just booked my airfare to head over to Paris for the Advanced Citrix Training class I’m putting on there with Benny Tritsch. Benny and I were in Paris last year for the same class and I’m thrilled to be bringing it back there. While I was having some conversations with a few different people in France I’ve heard rumblings that the reason for the delay of the release of CitrixTools.NET Virtual User Environment Manager (or VUEM) is because Pierre Marmignon’s employer has been slapped with a lawsuit by RES Software. I love the various tools that Pierre has developed and I know that he’s been working on VUEM for a very long time and I can only believe that it’s crushing him that this has happened and it’s preventing the release of the tool. To be completely honest I haven’t personally tested VUEM myself, but I’ve heard very nice things about it from other bloggers / consultants that have done testing with the early alpha releases, etc. I’m sure that it’s bothering Pierre after spending so much time on this tool that such a horrible thing could happen. I don’t know what Pierre’s thoughts are on this as I haven’t spoken to him about it yet, but I’m frankly a little surprised at this lawsuit situation. From what I know about VUEM it doesn’t really compete with RES Software at all. It’s probably closer of a competitor to something like Liquidware Labs or Immidio as it’s not nearly as feature complete as a RES PowerFuse or AppSense Environment Manager. That being said I can think of about 70 million reasons why RES might be a little nervous right now. To be clear I’ve got a great deal of respect for a lot of the guys at RES (especially guys like Max Ranzau @RESguru). But situations like this really make me question their intentions. Are the freeware tools of a community guy really at risk of upsetting the business of a large company like RES? Come on guys… You should be investing as much time, energy and money on improving and promoting your products and not trying to shut down a guy who’s done a lot of good for a whole lot of people.
Agree? Disagree? Let me know with a comment...