Absolutely!
Last week I attended Sun's annual "Sun Open Source Summit". The intent is to take a "pulse" on Sun's internal development community to ensure we're all learning from others about public community building. for me, an old dinosaur developer, this is something very new and very visionary.
A few years ago, Jonathan said "all Sun software will be developed in the public community" (probably not exact words, but you get the gist). Well, we definitely all thought, at least in the old SeeBeyond teams, that this would be tragic for us - this "we" definitely included me. However, over the past years, we have jumped in with both feet and the benefits are REAL! And, Jonathan's vision remains the same. He has, however, completely crystallized his message around the initial vision. He was the "guest" speaker at the summit last week and spoke for about half an hour about the multitude of advantages to Sun and our communities.
In my mind, there are a few top-level reasons he is absolutely right.
1. Enterprise users will always (and most must) pay for indemnity for the software they use in production.
2. Those that use the software and don't pay for it would not have paid for it anyway. But, now you have yet another user who gets familiar with your technology and when they go work for one of those companies in #1, guess who's software they are going to suggest...
3. the more "eye balls" you have on the code, the more bugs get caught and the less "bad code" can get in.
4. it gives our customers the ability to add features that we either don't have time/resources to add or deem it to be too isolated a use case.
5. and, most importantly, it provides the path for our teams to work transparently with our community of developers and customers!
So, in the coming weeks, you will see a number of our B2B and MDM initiatives moving "out there" to projects under our two communities on Java.net:
https://open-b2b.dev.java.net/ is the top-level of our Open B2B Community
and
https://mural.dev.java.net/ is the top-level of our Master Data Management Community
keep an eye on these - the components will start showing up very soon! COME JOIN US!