Markus, *;
Markus Karg schrieb:
[...]
> 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.
[...]
> 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.
+1 on that. I remember posting a question like this to this list(?) quite a
while ago (when the IBM aqcuisition rumours were just all around), but,
rudely speaking, so far it seems (for whichever reasons...) no one cares.
This morning I completed a Sun survey on Glassfish migration / adoption, and
the thing I left as a message is that, overally, though Glassfish is a great
technology we're at the moment afraid due to its uncertain future. We were
into greatly adopting the Glassfish/NetBeans tooling combo in order to move
most of our Spring based applications to EJB/Glassfish but have considerably
slowed down effort put into that, at the moment, because we are absolutely
unsure whether either NetBeans or Glassfish will have a future after the
acquisition is done. And the same time we're trying our best to make our
projects not just work with Glassfish but also with tomcat (which still is
possible) and Apache Geronimo (where EJBs and features "beyond" Java EE web
tier are involved). We had buying Sun support for Glassfish on our roadmap
for later this year actually, but this has terminated right now for obvious
reasons.
And this is where my main problem arises: We chose open source in order not
to be "locked in" with any vendor. We considered the idea of Glassfish being
(professionally, and, regarding at least our current experiences, at rather
high quality) supported by Sun while at the same time being an open-source
project (thus, hopefully, not too closely tied to Sun) a rather good thing.
At the moment, however, we fear that Glassfish being open-source might not
be worth a dime given the current acquisition discussion, and eventually due
to the fact that, while being open source, it's still "just" an "open source
Sun project" with no external developer and/or contributor community in
existence. This is bad, bad, bad. It's severely negative marketing to
Glassfish, and it's also severely negative marketing to Sun at the moment -
why buy support in such a state of obvious impending changes?
At the moment, I don't really care about Oracle, to be honest. Maybe this
might change given they might come up with a good strategy how to keep the
Sun open source projects and communities alive. If not, we will look for
alternatives. About Glassfish, NetBeans, ..., I was hoping for something
similar to what the "Open Database Alliance"[1] is to mySQL, some "community
driven effort" trying to provide even just an "optional perspective" of
keeping Glassfish/NetBeans/whatever alive at the given state and licensing
and feature set if/when Oracle might choose to make an "unfavorable" decision.
IMHO, "sticking to daily business routine" in terms of Glassfish marketing
and promotion without addressing this very obvious question is deadly and
totally counterproductive. :(
Okay, enough of that rant. Back to "daily business routine"... :)
K.
(who still hopes there's life for Glassfish, OpenESB and friends after "Oracle")
[1]
http://opendatabasealliance.com/
--
Kristian Rink
http://pictorial.zimmer428.net # kawazu@jabber.org
"What was once thought can never be unthought."
(Duerrenmatt - 'Die Physiker')