|
Nov
27
|
|
I've been a Star Office / OpenOffice user for many years - I use it exclusively. Admittedly, that was initially due to my employer's insistence but quite honestly I'd probably be using it by now anyway - I have a couple of Linux machines and IMO Open Office is still the most complete / polished suite for that market.
So, I care how well OpenOffice is doing in the broader market because every time another big company or organisation adopts OpenOffice - I know I'll benefit; ultimately. I'll benefit because OpenOffice will improve with every new user and the ISV base will expand as the user base expands.
So I was encouraged to see two OpenOffice related news items on my feed reader this morning. The first from C|Net reports that France's gendarmes and Ministry of Culture and Communication have adopted Linux (instead of Windows) and that includes OpenOffice. The second via e-week's (SJV-N) - OpenOffice gets a SharePoint-like extension via O3Spaces.
|
Nov
13
|
|
What Sun announced this morning should dispel any rumors about Sun's lack of commitment to Open Source. Anyone still claiming that our open source strategy is just a marketing stunt or a way to offload old IP might find it easier trying to support another myth.
The image is the Hereford Mappa-Mundi from the 12th Century which used a flat projection despite growing evidence to the contrary.
|
Jul
15
|
|
Marc Fleury is still continuing his crusade to convince people that GlassFish is irrelevant; but it's no longer a lone vigil, he's now joined by Bill Roth (BEA's VP of Product Marketing). Step back for a moment - 2 very busy people go out of their way talk to an obscure publication about the "irrelevance" of GlassFish - Yeah, right, maybe the combined brainpower will yield greater success. In the same article, there are some strange assertions by both Bill and Marc that GlassFish is not OpenSource - but as Jim Driscoll says in his blog - neither Marc nor Bill have any say as to what is "Open Source" - that is a sole privelage of the OSI. If they are intentionally spreading FUD (as opposed to being clueless) then that's a pretty desperate measure.
Back in the real-world, GlassFish's use of CDDL seems to have kicked off a flurry of debates regarding choice of Open Source licenses and business models - most notably Marc Fleury's comments were vigourously debated on TheServerSide and JavaLobby (another thread here) and the converstation on Jim Driscoll's blog has overflowed to TSS as well.
Of course, as Marc and Bill said this is all completely irrelevant - nothing to see here; move on.
Before wading into any debates about CDDL I heartily recommend reading the excellent blog entries by Simon Phipps and Claire Giordano which cover some of the motivations behind CDDL.
Technorati Tags : Java, OpenSource, JBoss, CDDL, Glassfish
|
Jul
6
|
|
I was just reading Andreas Schaefer's entry about GlassFish and though I would respond to some of his concerns.
Though Platform Edition doesn't compete feature-wise with JBoss - for the target market it has most of what it needs; ie. for 90% of the typical JBoss / Tomcat deployments. It also has some features not found in other products - JavaServer Faces, Web Services Security, full J2EE 1.4 IDE - for example.
PE has other advantages over the FREE / OSS competition - it's faster and possibly more robust; it's more appropriate for a broader range of skills (ie. simple installer, easy to use admin GUI console, great docs. and tutorials). It's also fairly well accpeted in the market - most people have at one time or another used the SDK.
In terms of feature parity, I think it would be natural for some features from the commercial products to sediment into the free product over time - specifically a simple HTTP load balancer and some rudimentary multi-machine management - to make it more appropriate for large clusters. [note, these are my thoughts - they are not future plans]
Are we too late with GlassFish ? Well, no-one would disagree that it would have been good to do this a couple of years ago but I don't think that would have changed the landscape much - I think there would still be competition with JBoss and Geronimo. I also don't think that JBoss has the market for OSS cornered - they have been operating in a market segment with little or no competition to date - their mettle will be tested in the coming year.
One thing is for sure - the next couple of years of Server Side Java are going to be fun. I think the pace of innovation (driven by the competition) will only increase and Java will gain more ground. Vendor's will be aggressive in pushing their platforms; with not only free tools but also free run-times - it will be increasingly hard to justify a non Java platform.
Competition is a good thing.
PS. Andreas - welcome to the team - hopefuly we'll have the opportunity to work together in the future - fresh perspectives are all always valued at Sun.
Java, Geronimo, JBoss, Glassfish
|
Dec
7
|
|
As of yesterday, you now have the chance to get involved and contribute content to the J2EE SDK java.net project - if you want your J2EE based tool, plugin, extension etc. to be seen and potentially used by literally millions of J2EE developers join and contribute today.
This project will be worth watching.
