Hi Whartung,
well disappointed is not the word I would use, but in essence you are
absolutely right. This is really unfortunate.
I also do _not_ believe that this is going to help SUN.
I very much care for SUN and I have a great respect for the company's
past and present. But their marketing and their business decisions
sometimes really suck.
They have done the same thing with Java - and I doubt that this did Java
any good. Anyone remembers Sun Java Desktop System? It actually was not
such a bad desktop, but what the heck had it to do with Java? This
confused people and I doubt that it supported its adoption.
Microsoft also uses certain names all over the place and confuses people
massively. Live and Windows keep rearing up anywhere MS develops a
product - and this also didn't work well for them.
Well, that is Microsoft, so I do not care. But with SUN things are
different.
SUN's marketing has the tendency to always repel people. For example:
While SUN's products and code played a massive role in any of Linux'
distributions (e.g. NFS or OpenOffice) they were regarded as the bad boy
of the Unix community while HP and IBM were regarded as the nice Linux
guys. How could this have happened? This had _nothing_ to do with
reality but was the effect of a swaying attitude towards Linux of SUN's
management.
This is a shame. They obviously deserve better given their great
products and I really would like to see them get back on track.
Now with Schwartz things have become better. Opening up Java and using
GPL as a second license for Netbeans and GlassFish helped SUN get the
deserved respect of the community. I really, really thought they would
get things right. But decisions like this naming scheme have a
resemblance to the days of the days where SUN did at the same time
denounced Linux and contributed and praised Linux. How on earth can
mixing up messages and confusing customers help a company?
Well I guess no one in marketing reads this list. But SUN has always
been an engineering company and thus I keep hoping ;-)
Even though marketing messed this up, GlassFish keeps being a great
product and hopefully a vibrant community. Never underestimate the power
of the community.
SUN is a big company and I think this transition they are in will last a
while (though hopefully with no more job losses). Thus I expect things
like this to happen every once in a while. But I hope they tend to get
less seldom.
--
Wolfram Rittmeyer