Hello John
Good to hear from you too !
Just to clarify.
I have said that the company I work for is interested in a stable and mature application server for production usage.
But I did not say that we will not be able to take some risks on stability or maturity if a very interesting feature has been integrated.
We would gain so much from the removal of the asadmin constraints or from the integration of Role Based Access Control in the administration console that we would probably be in position to take some risks (as long as we can keep them under control).
Unfortunately the risks do not include GF v3 that we can not even consider until it exists.
It is just about the balance between costs and gains for my company, as well as for Sun when making its decisions.
Those are indeed very specific needs expressed by a customer that paid a subscription.
So this mainly interests Sun as a software editor and there we are on a commercial discussion basis.
We are talking about support in that case : we will expect from Sun not to be blocked by every P1 bug that still exists or
any feature too difficult to implement.
(With the number of applications under development here, the probability that one application is impacted by a P1 bug is high !!)
Nonetheless, just take the point from an open source community point of view.
This allows to consider options or possibilities that Sun employees may not have thought ...
This is also a good way to consolidate GlassFish assets and increase its potential.
A community based discussion is much more about communication, durability, credibility and quality.
I am still not even talking about making decisions or workflows.
Good ideas or relevant needs do not need heavy decision process to be taken into account.
I talked with you before about customers groups organized by software editors around their own technologies.
Those groups are interesting for two main reasons:
1) it allows the customers to discuss about their achievements and their needs, and to share these with other customers
2) it allows the editors to learn about its customers needs, and to introduce its own ideas for collecting their opinions
Just replace customers by users and editors by contributors, if you prefer.
This may not be the right thing to do with an open source community, maybe more interesting for Sun for its own customers.
Nevertheless I think that GlassFish needs something to achieve the same objectives: JEE vX implementation may not be an achievement in itself.
This is not what finally will make GlassFish used or subscriptions paid. For early adopters maybe, but I am convinced that these really are a minority.
I completely understand the need for Sun to complete a "GlassFish v3, JEE6 reference implementation".
I would just put the stress on the fact that GlassFish v2.x, JEE5 reference implementation, will probably be of interest for a lot of people for a large period of time.
(At least for GF v3 or JEE6 to be very well tested)
Anyway I hope we could keep discussing about GlassFish for a long time.
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