Hi Markus:
I'm a novice J2EE user who really likes Glassfish and the idea of
Glassfish. I keep a Chrome page on Glassfish watching for project
updates. I would also like to understand what is going on behind the
scenes, as I consider myself an invested community member.
My comments are with regard to GlassFish / WebLogic merging. It would be
great to understand what is going on - and hey, maybe the community can
*help* if we understand the goal? But, if this is happening, first: 1)
My read of the Oracle purchase of Sun documents from some time ago lead
me to believe this would occur, and 2) Is this really such a bad thing?
Why maintain two full stacks? We've already seen some attempts to work
together with Oracle providing TopLink Essentials to Glassfish 2. Java
Server Faces 2.0, Metro, ... why should these be duplicated? If Oracle
is going to be able to afford to keep a commercial for sale product
along-side a community-based free / open source product, the business
model needs to be justifiable. FOSS business models can be justifiable.
I prefer the (old?) RedHat model, where Fedora was used as the "latest
and greatest", and once feature selection was finalized, and features
became completely stable, RedHat puts in additional effort to test the
product and roll it out as RHEL, their commercial product. If Oracle did
this - I would be perfectly happy.
I would rather that their resources were merged, working on a common
base, then having two separate development teams working on each in
competition, or one development team changing focus between each
product. There are too many J2EE products - consolidation at this point
would be a good thing. Just my opinion. :-)
But, I share Markus' view and the original "Disappointed" poster. I need
to understand that my investment in Glassfish is going to grant me a
return on my investment. I am pushing for the use of Glassfish at my
company. It comes in small pieces, like using Metro, or it can come in
larger pieces like using Glassfish as a whole. If months go by with very
little news, and very little maintenance, and Oracle appears to be doing
something in secret that has the chance of destroying the Glassfish
community, it introduces unacceptable risk, and switching to JBoss might
be the best decision. If we were to get a little clarification, it could
go a LONG way to re-assuring us that we are making the right decision by
betting on Glassfish and Oracle.
Cheers,
mark
On 07/11/2009 10:56 AM, Markus Karg wrote:
>
> Dear Oracle,
>
> since the day when Oracle obtained Sun there was no official
> statement, what will happen with GlassFish (while there had been lots
> of questions about the GlassFish future in this forum). It looks like
> Oracle is not very communicative about their actual plans or thinks
> that the GlassFish community is not worth getting told the truth.
> Well, if I can believe what an Oracle consultant told me in a private
> email today (what certainly was not an official statement, so we have
> to treat it as a rumour), then GlassFish currently is getting "merged"
> with WebLogic. As we all are Software Architects we can imagine that
> something like "merging" (in the sense of "keep everything unchanged
> but put it together into one piece") two application servers is, well,
> certainly near to impossible (unless both products had been branched
> from the same origin and you just try to merge back all change sets
> into the same trunk). I wonder (a) whether Oracle really thinks that
> such an attempt would be a technical possibility (do they really
> believe that inside of GlassFish would be anything which would be
> compatible with anything inside of WebLogic from the view of existing
> source code?) and (b) whether Oracle is not telling the GlassFish
> community the naked truth finally about their plans for GlassFish.
> After all, GlassFish is a community product (at least Sun always told
> so), so it is not friendly citizenship to do large code modifications
> "behind the scenes". The GlassFish community has a right to get told
> the actual plans. Are the open source times over? Is the idea of the
> community passé? Shall I go and tell our customers to skip to JBoss
> (as one of the last existing Open Source products)? What is going on?
> What??
>
> I think it is now the time to go to the public and tell the GlassFish
> community what actually is going on there. Tell us the (complete)
> truth! Now.
>
> Regards
>
> Markus
>
--
Mark Mielke<mark_at_mielke.cc>