No, in the innermost sense it is not. Typically with "the community" one
means the typical user. Neither Intel nor AMD are typical users. They do
not provide their contribution to make Linux better pe se, but to
increase the support of their very own products by Linux. They are no
users. They are vendors. This is a huge difference. "The community" is a
polypoly, while Oracle+Sun was an oligopoly and now is mostly a
monopoly. The "real" community (that one made up by real end users
providing improvements) just was in its very initial steps, and doing
anything behind the scenes threatends this efforts.
And no, Oracle did not provide TopLink as their contribution to the
community but they just saw the chance to put their already finished
product in place as the RI, which is a purely political and strategical
step and has nothing to do with the idea of a community contribution.
Not every contribution is a community contribution and not every open
source is a community effort, obviously.
It seems you are very optimistic and positive-thinking about Oracle's
targets and future steps. Seems either you or me is unaware of Oracle's
policy and the actual strategy behind it in the past. ;-) Anyways,
future will show whether it was you or me. :-)
About competition: Competition is the core idea of a free market and a
foundation of the first world's industrial success. There was no
competition in the communism and see what the result was. Competition is
always a good thing. There would have been no man on the moon without
competition. So yes, competition is VERY good for JavaEE. Competition is
the core idea behind a polypoly and having only four or five JavaEE
servers is not a polypoly but an oligopoly. Each MBA can tell you in
five minutes why an oligopoly is a very very bad thing. And JavaEE is no
exemption.
And dear Oracle: The community (except Mark) is NOT willing to wait any
more months to get told your future plans with GlassFish. ;-)
Regards
Markus
From: Mark Mielke [mailto:mark_at_mark.mielke.cc]
Sent: Samstag, 11. Juli 2009 20:14
To: users_at_glassfish.dev.java.net
Subject: Re: GlassFish getting "Merged" with WebLogic?
On 07/11/2009 12:01 PM, Markus Karg wrote:
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).
The availability of Glassfish and JBoss have already reduced the value
of WebLogic for WebLogic customers. Stable full featured solutions exist
for low cost, and the users have the option of re-evaluating their
choices. Do they need paid support / subscription services or can they
participate in a community and use a FOSS product?
I am positive Oracle knows this. I am certain they have business
intelligence teams who are working through the new opportunities to be
exploited as a result of this evolving economy. I see their choice to
bid on Sun to be evidence that they know their business model needs to
change, and they believe the market share, resources and product
portfolio in Sun will provide them the capabilities to continue to
thrive in the future.
I would like to think that open sourcing pieces of WebLogic and a merged
with Glassfish is a great win-win solution for everybody. This does
*not* mean that "paying customers will not get anything for their
money". There will always be companies that require support /
subscription services. If we look at the database field with PostgreSQL
and commercial support offerings like EnterpriseDB, it is possible to
have a fully free open source offering, with companies still requiring
support and other value add subscription-based services.
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?
If a company provides a new optimization engine to GCC, or if Intel or
AMD contribute code to the Linux kernel, is this not a community
contribution? Oracle is part of the community. Oracle provided TopLink
Essentials as their contribution to the Glassfish community.
All the duplicates are needed because they are open source, while
Oracle's products (mostly) are not.
Not sure that this is really relevant. Obviously, there is some "worst
case scenario" where Oracle steals all the good things from Glassfish
and puts it into WebLogic, and then kills the Glassfish community, but
there is no reason to assume that this is the only outcome. Oracle
already released TopLink Essentials. They could release more. If they
can come up with a business model that would make this feasible and
profitable, it can be a win-win for everybody.
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.
Concurrent development is not the right term here. Concurrent
development is what allows multiple designers to work on the same
projects together. "Concurrent" = "Working together at the same time".
A better description would be *Competing* development. Is competing
development, with conflicting direction and implementation a good thing?
Sure, it can be, but there is a limit to the benefit. Having two
competing products can lead to a healthy "raise the bar" style of
progress. Having dozens of competing products leads to confusion and
inefficiency. The greatest minds and greatest contributors should be
pooling together to come up with the best solution. I'm all for having
some healthy competition - but I've believe I've come across dozens of
J2EE solutions in the last few years. To me, JBoss vs Glassfish/WebLogic
vs WebSphere is enough. Oracle and IBM need to have products that
compete in the FOSS domain to protect their investment by encouraging
adoption. FOSS is a business requirement in 2008+. Any company who does
not embrace FOSS and find a way to work with FOSS will find themselves
obsolete in only a few years. I think Oracle and IBM know this, and
Oracle's bid for Sun is an acknowledgement of this truth.
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.
For sure. If they want to protect their investment and maintain
community trust, they need to open up about their plans. If the lawyers
are taping their mouths shut, they need to get this purchase complete
and out of the way as quickly as possible.
I'm willing to wait a few more months, but the longer it takes, the more
good will they will lose.
Cheers,
mark
--
Mark Mielke <mark_at_mielke.cc> <mailto:mark_at_mielke.cc>