Oh Yes, The Sun Has Not Set ... Yet.

Ciao Fabrizio,

I do not necessarily agree that a forge is a lesser god compared to a product - if you can move to another forge, you can move to another open source product. This is the usual disturbing idea of "open source" == "free as in beer" off-the-shelf products.

As to IBM's approach, I would imagine they would have migrated the whole repositories onto their own cloud and possibly onto Rational Jazz... but that's only an hypotesis.

Alessandro,

Please don't take offense to this, but I do hope you can acknowledge that you are stating the obvious here and I am not sure it adds much value at this point (indeed it may be causing some easily avoidable harm). I think it would be much more useful to actually work with Oracle to ensure they get the right constructive feedback when it is obviuos that it is actually needed to help make the best decision for both them and the community at large. The truth is that cutting other things before cutting these makes sound sense all around and they know that.

That being said, it is clear to me that you are expressing genuine conceen that is not malicious, so that is ultimately good (in moderation) :-).

Cheers,
Reza

The problem for Glassfish, as the first sentence of that ServerSide article states, is that Oracle view it as "non mission critical" (I believe Oracle used the terms "departmental" and also "reference implementation"). Technology just doesn't come into it. Not so long ago Oracle spent a -big- wad of money acquiring an app server (Weblogic) and then a stack of more money porting all its other products into it and branding the resulting mess^H^H^H^Hplatform Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Now not only do they have their third app server (OC4J/OAS, Weblogic and Glassfish), but the Sun product suite includes products that compete with various Fusion Middleware 11g products (portals, ESBs, and so on).

 So on one hand you've got a "departmental" application server, which you can either licence for free by using the open-source version, or buy support for the fancier version, and on the other, an expensive, full-stack-integrated (all the way to the IDE), fully branded platform that Oracle just invested a vast amount of money into, and are pushing it like crazy the past six months.And hte same sales team will sell both this licensed "departmental" Glassfish. And if you say the magic words like "need a fault-tolerant cluster" or "maybe we might build a portal" lo and behold you'll find the molto-dinero "Fusion Middleware 11g" solution installed all over your sorry arse quicker than you can say "can you please explain this per-core with special CPU-architecture-loading-factor licencing schema to me once again and why is it a different price if I upgrade my hardware without adding any additional cores and why won't you let me run it under Red Hat 5 running on a plain vanilla Xen hypervisor?". Even if you deliberately ask for Glassfish directly I bet you'll have to fight off the Weblogic borg absolutely tooth and nail to the last man as they repeatedly try to board your IT department.

Basically, after a year of not selling barely any Glassfish/Sun-One licences - because if you ask for any of the features that are in the licenced version and not the open-source one, you'll be pushed to Weblogic (and anyway, at ten times the price they'll prefer to sell you Weblogic as a default position) - Oracle will announce, "there's no sales in it", then probably ditch the licenced version completely, leaving only the open source version. Finally they'll cut the open source funding off and it will have to limp along without hardly any of the resources it formerly had.

It's a pity 'cos IMHO Glassfish is ten thousand times a better app server than anything Oracle ever produced, or even bought.