> > Do you have any idea what open source stands for?
> I have to wonder if you do. :-)
> Open source means very little - except that the software provider gives
> you access to their source code. It doesn't tell us whether the
> software
> costs money to license or support or not. It doesn't say what quality
> the software is. It doesn't say what level of community contributions
> there are, or what level of corporate sponsorship is provided. None of
> this is related to "open source". Glassfish is "open source", as the
> source code is provided to the public. It's as simple as that, and as
> irrelevant as that. Great, it is open source - so what?
This is true, but the overall experience with "NON-LAME" Open Source projects like Apache, MySQL, Linux, KDE etc. is that all those assumptions *there* are true. So people expect Sun's Open Source projects to fulfill the same assumptions, just due to the big stakeholder backing it, the size of the community, and the well known project name.
Certainly you are right from the pure word "open source", but the "idiot" is also right from his overall experience with other big open source projects. So we (the community) should understand what people expect, and try to fulfil it, or make clear, that in GlassFish things are a bit different (so nobody later gets disappointed after downloading).
Regards
Markus