Mark,
the merge IS a bad thing because this is the forum of the GlassFish OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY while WebLogic is NOT an open source community (AFAIK). Since it makes no sense to drop a commercial product, this merge obviously result in the dead of the community. So it IS a bad thing. If you want to keep the community alive, you need to keep both stacks alive (unless you will kill the code base of Web Logic, what means, that paying customers will not get anything for their money).
About TopLink: There was no working "together". Oracle provided his product and Sun used it. What has this to do with the idea of COMMUNITY?
All the duplicates are needed because they are open source, while Oracle's products (mostly) are not.
I do not think there are too many JavaEE products (did you count them?) or that concurrent developent is a bad think: Concurrent development leads to continuous improvement.
Anyways, all I say is, that it is time to get some official statements about the current state and the plans for the future. It is not a good situation to not publish any news, it leads to rumors, which leads to users switching over to other products like JBoss -- which was exactly what happened today if you checked the newsgroup. Sun and Oracle shall just tell the things as they are, instead of not publishing any news.
Regards
Markus
From: Mark Mielke [mailto:mark_at_mark.mielke.cc]
Sent: Samstag, 11. Juli 2009 17:21
To: users_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
Subject: Re: GlassFish getting "Merged" with WebLogic?
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> <mailto:mark_at_mielke.cc>