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Rod Johnson on Oracle/BEA and Sun/MySQL
Rod Johnson has posted "The Power of Adoption: Why No Company is Big Enough to Deny Developers What They Want," giving us his thoughts on the two acquisitions announced today. His perspective is interesting because Spring is so important for both sets of companies.The acquisition of MySQL by Sun marks one of the most significant recognitions of the importance and power of open source as a disruptive force in technology. Under Jonathan Schwartz, Sun is reinventing itself as an open source company, as shown by their investment in the open source application server Glassfish, their decision to open source Java, and the change of their ticker symbol to JAVA. Schwartz and Sun faced a significant challenge: how do you reinvent a gigantic company as a software company–challenging powerful incumbents in the process? I believe that Schwartz has shown real vision in recognition that this was possible only by taking advantage of the modern method of software distribution–open source.
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We've always had a a great relationship with BEA and with the most recent release of WebLogic Server using Spring at its core, that relationship has deepened. Additionally we've always had a great relationship with Oracle. Oracle's acquisition of BEA brings together two SpringSource partners and we anticipate enjoying an even stronger relationship with the combined company.
That said, Oracle has an obvious but difficult decision to make as a company which now has two application servers. Our expectation is that the Oracle application server, OC4J, is history and Oracle will focus on driving WebLogic Server. The driver here, again, is adoption. Even a company as powerful as Oracle, with the ability to mandate a complete stack for many customers, has failed to make its application server an independent force in the market despite numerous attempts and the efforts of some talented developers. While WebLogic is a closed source product (which albeit contains much open source), it owes its market position, even today, to its adoption and loyalty of developers, in much the same way as MySQL. BEA's success has always seemed to be directly proportional to the amount of effort it has spent on building a strong developer communication.
...
Another link between these acquisitions are that Sun and Oracle now appear to be on a collision course. Oracle history shows their utter determination to crush any competitors in the database space, and their ability to do so. Sun is now a competitor in that highly profitable core business. With the loss of momentum from JBoss, the Java EE application server market now looks set to be a two-horse race between IBM and Oracle. Glassfish gives Sun a dark horse in this race, but it's unclear whether this market category will show the growth to accommodate a new entrant, given the growing predominance of Tomcat as a production platform. Good points, all.
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Message #245322
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Re: Rod Johnson on Oracle/BEA and Sun/MySQL
I agree with the premise that SUN has changed it focus to concentrate on OpenSource Technologies like Netbeans and Glassfish. I think SUN has finally found its niche, as a Java developer I have never been so excited about SUN and the direction it is moving.
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Message #245329
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Re: Rod Johnson on Oracle/BEA and Sun/MySQL
I think Sun will get a good advantage from the unavoidable product overlapping and license confusion coming from BEA'a acquisition by Oracle.
I see a great future for the Sun open-source stack, even if a big company like Sun still shows a lot of internal resilience moving on that new direction: good market for Sun external partners anyway ;)
The MySQL acquisition by Sun is really a brilliant move, I just hope they are going to manage it much better than the SeeBeyond one...
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Message #245331
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OC4J
Our expectation is that the Oracle application server, OC4J, is history and Oracle will focus on driving WebLogic Server.
I think it might be too late to jettison OC4J because that is the foundation of their Fusion platform, especially for 11g, which not only Java EE applications will rely on but also pure play acquisitions that will also leverage it.
While as a former BEA developer, I would hate to see Oracle scuttle WebLogic just to eliminate a competitor; what I instead see is that they'll probably merge the two platforms in someway to create an uber platform that brings the best of both products to its customers.
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Message #245332
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Re: OC4J
I think it might be too late to jettison OC4J because that is the foundation of their Fusion platform, especially for 11g, which not only Java EE applications will rely on but also pure play acquisitions that will also leverage it.
I think AquaLogic is a much better ESB offering than Fusion. If I were an Oracle customer, I'd welcome the opportunity (fairly priced) to move off Oracle's current 3rd rate engines and on to BEA's first class ones.
Of the major middleware companies out there, I've always thought BEA had the best stuff. Now their marketing, sales and contracts people were another matter. I've worked at two major major organizations where WebSphere was purchased just to spite some idiots at BEA. With the Oracle acquisition I don't see that part getting any better.
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Message #245335
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Commercial Open Source is a dead end - for users and supporters
So, some smart guys managed to become rich by exploiting Open Source Software and Open Source 'communities'. Good for them. But what does that mean for the users? They now are at the discretion of a big company that most probably is unwilling and/or unable to develop the product in the long run.
In the future users should watch out for the motives behind an OS endeavor. Is OS just a means for commercial success or is the spirit of OS the driving force? Only the latter will (probably) produce long lasting, community supported software. In that sense, Apache and many of the 'classic' BSD and (L)GPL based projects create good OSS, whereas MySQL, Spring, JBoss and other companies just product products with an OS tag attached.
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Message #245336
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Re: OC4J
what I instead see is that they'll probably merge the two platforms in someway to create an uber platform that brings the best of both products to its customers.
If this happens, Oracle people may drown BEA guys in politics...
Regards,
Slava Imeshev
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Message #245337
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Bluestoned Again
I don't know. Proprietary product company buys proprietary product company and opensource product company buys opensource product company. Guess which one I'd put my money on to stay open. X-Bluestoners please buy a beer for the OC4Jers.
Oracle has shown how it can't grow what has become a commodity space (app servers) and now needs to buy marketshare. My hat off to BEA for putting the screws to Oracle to get a better price. Talk about JBoss losing steam, let us see what happens to WebLogic. BEA has great products and a great track-record with the development community. Oracle, please don't screw this one up.
Sun, on the other hand, buys a growth product for 1/8th the price. Sun has huge goodwill after opensourcing Java so everyone feels good about the future of MySql. A Sun supported database drives marketshare even more. Support contracts lead to combined hardware/software/support contracts. Clearly a star to Oracle's cash cow.
A good day for Sun.
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Message #245346
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Spring is always great
Spring is always a great company with outstanding quality in software computing.
Irrespective of whereever I go, spring framework has an outstanding value in the eyes of end users, developers and real architect ( I am not talking about stupid sleepy conceptual architects)
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Message #245351
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Two Acquisitions - No big gains
For BEA, I was hoping they would succeed at combining the power of JRockit with AquaLogic to build scalable workflow (ala BPM) services. Instead, we users and developers will be waiting for years to see WebLogic and AquaLogic integrated into the Oracle Fusion Middleware stack.
For MySQL, I was hoping for an IPO. My company, PushToTest, is an open-source software publisher and I was looking to MySQL to show me the way to go really big. $1 Billion just does not sound like that much considering Oracle is currently worth $113 Billion. Actually a lot of us in the OSS space were looking for the MySQL IPO as a proof-point that OSS investments are a good thing generally.
To the good people at BEA and MySQL I send a heart felt congratulations. As a user and developer I wonder what the future holds?
-Frank Cohen
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Message #245352
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What else do you expect?
As a programmer, I still have to pay for foods, rent/mortgage, doctor's bills, and my children's ``higher education'' in 20 years. Just got back from doctor's office -- he got me waiting for 2 hours, spent 2 minutes talking to me before sending me with a prescription of a common antibiotic, and will bill me and my insurance company for an upward of $500 USD.
I have absolutely no problem working for free as long as whatever I use are also free.
Until then, I have no problem people using OS as a marketing pitch.
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Message #245358
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Re: What else do you expect?
As a programmer, I still have to pay for foods, rent/mortgage, doctor's bills, and my children's ``higher education'' in 20 years. Just got back from doctor's office -- he got me waiting for 2 hours, spent 2 minutes talking to me before sending me with a prescription of a common antibiotic, and will bill me and my insurance company for an upward of $500 USD.
I have absolutely no problem working for free as long as whatever I use are also free.
Until then, I have no problem people using OS as a marketing pitch.
Hi,
I hear you. I've got bills also. The issue though is common ownership versus "corporate ownership".
Other industries manage to pull it off. Independent standards bodies can help. User communities pulling together and sponsoring (paying for) common property is a great idea also.
Whats wrong with the Apache approach?
Paul.
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Message #245362
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Re: Two Acquisitions - No big gains
For MySQL, I was hoping for an IPO. My company, PushToTest, is an open-source software publisher and I was looking to MySQL to show me the way to go really big. $1 Billion just does not sound like that much
Frank, my initial reaction was similar, and i'm in somewhat similar position as you.
As of now, it seems that the only OS business model that works is to get reasonable market share and then just wait for the heavens to open and the Angel of Acquisition to land with wads of cash.
As of the 1B valuation; one could argue that both BEA and MySQL had great products, but only BEA had a business.
/Henri Karapuu
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Message #245363
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Glassfish vs Tomcat
The problem with Glassfish is that it forces you to run more than you really need. For those of us with no interest of using Enterprise JavaBean it pisses us off not being able to uninstall it :) The great thing about Glassfish is its community (love it!). They really listen to their users, which is why version 3 is going to enable you to roll out a lightweight server as I was asking for.
Tomcat, on the other hand, has a dark history in the form of Remmy :) How can one take an open-source product seriously when the person in charge of the bug tracker closes all bugs as WON'T FIX without bothering to understand what you actually wrote? That kind of attitude might make him popular with the ladies but it sure as heck doesn't work for me :) It's one of the reasons that I plan on jumping off of Tomcat the second I find a lightweight alternative.
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Message #245365
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Re: What else do you expect?
Man, you always knew doctors make more money, why did you risk it and became a programmer?
So programmers are destined to make even less money now, dont you know feel worst for choosing to be a developers. With so many software being developed for free.
Those evil trovalds-like, they are ruining everything!
Everything should be free man, not just software, eventually everything will! Yea even healthcare :)))
Not in our age thought, doctors will work for free, and farmers will work for free, and life will all be free, and all will pick his job, just based on what he is good at, not based on what makes more money.
IT is just ahead of everything as usual :)))
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Message #245370
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Re: What else do you expect?
Those evil trovalds-like, they are ruining everything!
Everything should be free man, not just software, eventually everything will! Yea even healthcare :)))
Sex first of all, what else (well, it could be considered a form of healthcare).
Guido
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Message #245374
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Re: Momentum
Rod, you must be closely watching the U.S. political race to come up with an app server theory on momentum that has WebSphere and WebLogic in the front-runner category:
"With the loss of momentum from JBoss, the Java EE application server market now looks set to be a two-horse race between IBM and Oracle."
That is pure F.U.D. that has more to do with Spring's insecurity about Seam than any reality in JBoss' ability to stay relevant in the marketplace; i'll give you that the lack of JEE5 support via a release of JBoss 5 is dis-concerting, but given your previous analysis on TSS of JEE5, and how you and SpringSource are waiting for JEE6, I don't see why this would be a major area of concern...
In reality, and this is proven out by actual numbers that I don't really care about looking up, though will wait for Solomon Duskis to come on here and rebuke, Glassfish and JBoss are eating WS and WL alive...so, good 4 u, 4 recognizing the Glassfish potential/threat/emergence/option, and I liked your entry on the two acquisitions from yesterday...
but, in the absence of having to listen to Bill Burke, I figured I would defend JBoss, maybe you could be more specific: what r u seeing that is the cause of this so-called lost momentum?...
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Message #245376
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Re: What else do you expect?
As a programmer, I still have to pay for foods, rent/mortgage, doctor's bills, and my children's ``higher education'' in 20 years. Just got back from doctor's office -- he got me waiting for 2 hours, spent 2 minutes talking to me before sending me with a prescription of a common antibiotic, and will bill me and my insurance company for an upward of $500 USD.
I have absolutely no problem working for free as long as whatever I use are also free.
Until then, I have no problem people using OS as a marketing pitch.
You talk as if someone makes you work for free ;-)
BTW there are doctors that work for free (just because they want to help people more than making money) of course most of them have payed job as well.
Same goes for Open Source developers.
Where are products that are created in order to help other people.
Of course there are Open Source products that make money on Support & Trainings, usually these products are mature and have very good user base (Spring Framework or Hibernate for an instance).
From my own experience.
The better programmer you are the less good programmers surrounds you in your company. The more you want to work with good programmers. But the company can't pay for many good programmers. What can you do? Go to Open Source projects and work with others like you.
Regards,
Vitaliy S
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Message #245381
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Re: Momentum
IMHO only jhat (jboss readhat) guys want to see Seam as competitor of Spring.
Seam is just a seam for jpa and jsf while Spring is IoC Container with great AOP suppport, with perfect support for Jdbc, Hibernate,Jdo, JPA etc on DAO level and reach support of different web frameworks GWT, JSF, Struts, SpringMVC (to name a few).
Now can you please explain how Spring can feel insecure about Seam?
Regards,
Vitaliy S
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Message #245389
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Re: Commercial Open Source is a dead end - for users and support
I think that free software can`t live without commercial one (payed support for open source soft is still a way of making money - so I see it to be a commercial one).
I see so-called open source and really free software to be not the result of a great willingness to work for free. I see one main reason why people start to work on an OS project: many people have the same tasks and the same greedy bosses who does not want to pay for commercial software when they already have a programmer (full day!) :). And it is much more efficient to work on the task together than trying to solve it on their own.
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Message #245399
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Re: What else do you expect?
Man, you always knew doctors make more money, why did you risk it and became a programmer?
For me, that's because I love programming. And when I started on programming with an Apple II at 12, there weren't any open source or pirate software to deal with.
Yeah... I still make quite a bit of money compare to many other people. Previously I worked on language compilers and runtime, that were a lot fun coming with the money; but nowaday, I had to work on "custom programming" doing things like fixing small UI problems on the request of the customer. (Not that I don't think complex and fun, but more and more of that have been replaced with dumb customizations.)
I'm afraid much of the fun and challenge stuff ("the commons") are now free and programmers who enjoyed the real stuff have to stick with shitty custom programming projects (which do deserved outsourced though I don't want to see that happen.)
Unless one wants to give up either the salary or one's life outside the job to work on free software.
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Message #245407
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Re: Momentum
I wonder how relevant Weblogics and Webspheres of the worlds will be in future. Small companies (or large companies with small/internal customer base) will prefer free software like JBoss/Glassfish/Tomcat+Spring, even if it means compromising a little on features and/or performance - they more than meet their requirements.
Large companies with money to burn and high performance requirements might prefer to build customized versions of open source software (for example, Google's version of Linux).
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Message #245414
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Re: Two Acquisitions - No big gains
I am with you Frank. Honestly, MySQL is a bargain to SUN. I guess Marten and the VC behind MySQL AG could not wait any longer to cash out MySQL. However, an OpenSource company to go public is not that easy at this point of time.
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Message #245415
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Download Statistics
Rod, you must be closely watching the U.S. political race to come up with an app server theory on momentum that has WebSphere and WebLogic in the front-runner category:
"With the loss of momentum from JBoss, the Java EE application server market now looks set to be a two-horse race between IBM and Oracle."
That is pure F.U.D. that has more to do with Spring's insecurity about Seam than any reality in JBoss' ability to stay relevant in the marketplace;
Let's break this statement down into two issues:
1) pure F.U.D.
Download statistics show that JBoss downloads are doing quite well indeed: there were 84,495 downloads in Dec 2007, and 99,941 in Nov 2007
Spring is doing respectably well, but not quite as well as JBoss: 68,928 in Dec 2007 and 79,200 in Nov 2007.
I can't speak to the WebLogic or Web's Fear numbers...
Tomcat has something on the order of 250,000 downloads per month.
2) "Spring's insecurity about Seam"
Seam had 10,637 downloads in December, and 15,428 in November.
I'm not going to comment about Spring being scared of Seam... I'll leave that sort of stuff to others. I'm not convinced of this angle at all.
In reality, and this is proven out by actual numbers that I don't really care about looking up, though will wait for Solomon Duskis to come on here and rebuke, Glassfish and JBoss are eating WS and WL alive...
Thanks for the mention Doug... Free publicity is always good.
I couldn't find Glassfish download statistics... but I would also be interested in an apples-to-apples comparison methodology for WS, WL, JBoss and Glassfish.
so, good 4 u, 4 recognizing the Glassfish potential/threat/emergence/option, and I liked your entry on the two acquisitions from yesterday...
Overall, the entry was excellent. I definitely liked Rod's analysis of SUN/MySQL and Oracle/BEA. We'll see where Glassfish goes; it definitely seems to be the darkhorse.
but, in the absence of having to listen to Bill Burke, I figured I would defend JBoss, maybe you could be more specific: what r u seeing that is the cause of this so-called lost momentum?...
I hope that my statistics helped the JBoss case... although I'd definitely like to hear from Bill.
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Message #245418
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Re: Download Statistics
Rod, you must be closely watching the U.S. political race to come up with an app server theory on momentum that has WebSphere and WebLogic in the front-runner category:
"With the loss of momentum from JBoss, the Java EE application server market now looks set to be a two-horse race between IBM and Oracle."
That is pure F.U.D. that has more to do with Spring's insecurity about Seam than any reality in JBoss' ability to stay relevant in the marketplace;
Let's break this statement down into two issues:
1) pure F.U.D.
Download statistics show that JBoss downloads are doing quite well indeed: there were 84,495 downloads in Dec 2007, and 99,941 in Nov 2007
Spring is doing respectably well, but not quite as well as JBoss: 68,928 in Dec 2007 and 79,200 in Nov 2007.
I can't speak to the WebLogic or Web's Fear numbers...
Tomcat has something on the order of 250,000 downloads per month.
2) "Spring's insecurity about Seam"
Seam had 10,637 downloads in December, and 15,428 in November.
I'm not going to comment about Spring being scared of Seam... I'll leave that sort of stuff to others. I'm not convinced of this angle at all.
In reality, and this is proven out by actual numbers that I don't really care about looking up, though will wait for Solomon Duskis to come on here and rebuke, Glassfish and JBoss are eating WS and WL alive...
Thanks for the mention Doug... Free publicity is always good.
I couldn't find Glassfish download statistics... but I would also be interested in an apples-to-apples comparison methodology for WS, WL, JBoss and Glassfish.
so, good 4 u, 4 recognizing the Glassfish potential/threat/emergence/option, and I liked your entry on the two acquisitions from yesterday...
Overall, the entry was excellent. I definitely liked Rod's analysis of SUN/MySQL and Oracle/BEA. We'll see where Glassfish goes; it definitely seems to be the darkhorse.
but, in the absence of having to listen to Bill Burke, I figured I would defend JBoss, maybe you could be more specific: what r u seeing that is the cause of this so-called lost momentum?...
I hope that my statistics helped the JBoss case... although I'd definitely like to hear from Bill.
These numbers make interesting reading. Especially the 250K downloads for Tomcat. It appears that Developers aren't that stupid. They can spot "commercial products" masquerading as "free software". The difficulty that both the Spring and JBoss camps face (and any commercial software, open source or closed), is that they always have to compete on features, meeting the demands of corporate (purchase) decision makers if they are to make a profit on subscriptions, support etc.
The advantage Tomcat has is that it only needs to satisfy the needs of its self selecting user community (mostly developers) the simplest and cleanest way possible. No need to compete with unnecessary features, no need to promise the world by claiming to be "the next silver bullet", no need to meet bloated "standards", no need to satisfy market pundits, all they need to do is deliver the simplest thing that works. They have a different motive from a commercial entity.
The Apache "Not for Profit Foundation" model seems to be thriving, in comparison with the "Commercial Open Source" model. Of course having several models to choose from is a good thing, but open source is not the same as community based and I think these numbers show this.
Paul.
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Message #245423
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Re: Download Statistics
Downloads from SF is only a part of the story, and taking relative levels can be misleading. Open source products are downloadable from many places these days, not just SF, and some projects advertise some download places more than their SF location. Other download locations include Maven1/2 repos for which there are no stats. Can't remember the last time I got anything for SF for any open source project ...
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Message #245426
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Re: Download Statistics
These numbers make interesting reading. Especially the 250K downloads for Tomcat. It appears that Developers aren't that stupid. They can spot "commercial products" masquerading as "free software".
Paul, i'v always had great respect for your opinion, but this time you are reading too much from the numbers.
You simply cannot compare the download numbers of servlet container with full application servers, and deduce that the servlet container is more popular because it is not part of the Conspiracy. In this case, tomcat is used in all those small projects that do not require full app server, and tomcat is the usual starting point for java newbies and PHP kids trying out java. These are enough to effect the download numbers by an order of magnitude.
The Apache "Not for Profit Foundation" model seems to be thriving, in comparison with the "Commercial Open Source" model.
Thriving in what sense? What is the purpose of open source?
/Henri Karapuu
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Message #245430
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Re: Download Statistics
Hi Henri,
I agree you can't read too much into these numbers, and you are right they can be interpreted a number of ways. I Still think that they support a trend I believe I've noticed. For me Free Software works best when it scratches someones personal itch. "I wrote it because I needed it". This is Market pull, from an initial market/community of one. Often it turns out that other people have the same itch and the community grows by itself.
Thens there is Market push. "I think I can sell this an make money, so I'm going to build it". The market grows by convincing others that they need your product.
Examples that come to mind of "Market pull" is the success of Rails. Signal37 didn't give a stuff whether anyone else wanted to use Rails they built it for themselves and they make their money out of the software they sell using it. As a policy they have chosen not to commercially exploit Rails. I believe this decision as had a positive effect on the Rails community and a positive effect on its design.
Rubinius another project, being sponsored by EngineYard a web hosting company. They want a high performance, multi-threaded Ruby, so they are paying guys to build it. They have no intention of selling Rubinius in anyway. I can think of other examples too..
These projects seem to have a different spirit and a different ethos to commercial open source. The Apache Foundation has a similar feel IMO. After all the Apache Server was written by a bunch of web administrators who wanted their own server. That was their original itch.
I could be wrong, and I'm interested in what others have to say on this subject.
In answer to your question "Thriving in what sense and what is the purpose of open source?". Thriving in terms of adoption rates, and the purpose in my view of "Free Software" is to provide common property for a self selecting community so everyone in that community benefits. It is like common ownership of the Roads, We pool our resources and we all benefit. I say Free Software instead of Open Source because the two are different things. As you probably know Richard Stallman has a lot to say on this difference.
What is "commercial Open Source for"? Beyond making money for investors, I'm not sure. This is a question for someone from a commercial open source company.
Paul.
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Message #245436
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Re: Download Statistics
[...] For me Free Software works best when it scratches someones personal itch. [...] The Apache Foundation has a similar feel IMO. After all the Apache Server was written by a bunch of web administrators who wanted their own server. That was their original itch.
I could be wrong, and I'm interested in what others have to say on this subject.
On the other hand, many projecs on Apache appear to be driven by a commercial interest (e.g. ActiveMQ, ServiceMix, CXF, Axis2, ...) and are backed by one or more companies. Probably the "Apache" label (and license!) is perceived as "more professional" (and/or more business-friendly) than, say, SourceForge or Codehaus.
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Message #245440
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Non SF Downloads
Downloads from SF is only a part of the story, and taking relative levels can be misleading. Open source products are downloadable from many places these days, not just SF, and some projects advertise some download places more than their SF location. Other download locations include Maven1/2 repos for which there are no stats. Can't remember the last time I got anything for SF for any open source project ...
I definitely agree with you. I wonder if the maven repo guys can aggregate that kind of statistics.
I got the idea for using SF downloads from JBoss's Bill Burke who's obviously biased towards JBoss... but it's an interesting statistic nonetheless.
In this case, the JBoss download statistics at least show that JBoss is thriving.
I personally am a Spring fan, but I've learned the hard way that anti-JBoss sentiment without backup brings both pain and a really long TSS thread :).
It would be nice if there was an apples-to-apples comparison with all of this, but alas, there isn't... The maven repo idea seems like a good place to expand our knowledge.
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Message #245453
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Re: Download Statistics
For me Free Software works best when it scratches someones personal itch. "I wrote it because I needed it".
I don't share your experiences in this regard; most of the 'best' (quality of code, documentation and support) open source projects that i have used have been part of some commercial Conspiracy, with paid full time developers.
I agree that those projects have different feeling, but when i work i don't care a crap what kind of feeling some software has -- i get paid for delivering working solutions for customers.
Also, it's no fun when the personal itch that the software scratches goes away, and the project is abandoned. Itch for financial gain is good in the sense that it's ever lasting :)
Thriving in terms of adoption rates, and the purpose in my view of "Free Software" is to provide common property for a self selecting community so everyone in that community benefits. It is like common ownership of the Roads
That might be the idealistic 'Stallmanian' purpose, but things are so much more complex today than the pure 'Free Software'.
My point with the question was that currently there is no single purpose of open source. Some do it to increase the peace, love and happiness in the world, others to gain fame, companies do it to lower development cost, or for financial gain etc. Who is to say which it is the 'right' purpose?
/Henri Karapuu
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Message #245449
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Re: Non SF Downloads
I really need to ask the obvious question regarding the statistical data presented as it does not add it in my mind.
Are there 250,000 new tomcat users (developers) each month?
If not then are Tomcats users potential candidates for inclusion in the film "Memento". I am surprised as I thought Java was "dying".
Why are users repeatedly downloading the same piece of software? Does it change so frequent (I did not think so) and if so are these particular versions being pushed repeatedly into production.
William
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Message #245462
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Re: Download Statistics
For me Free Software works best when it scratches someones personal itch. "I wrote it because I needed it".
I don't share your experiences in this regard; most of the 'best' (quality of code, documentation and support) open source projects that i have used have been part of some commercial Conspiracy, with paid full time developers.
Getting paid for it, doesn't stop it being a personal itch. As I said companies have sponsored Free Software efforts precisely because it scratches their itch. And the programmers got paid.
I agree that those projects have different feeling, but when i work i don't care a crap what kind of feeling some software has -- i get paid for delivering working solutions for customers.
Also, it's no fun when the personal itch that the software scratches goes away, and the project is abandoned. Itch for financial gain is good in the sense that it's ever lasting :)
Thriving in terms of adoption rates, and the purpose in my view of "Free Software" is to provide common property for a self selecting community so everyone in that community benefits. It is like common ownership of the Roads
That might be the idealistic 'Stallmanian' purpose, but things are so much more complex today than the pure 'Free Software'.
My point with the question was that currently there is no single purpose of open source. Some do it to increase the peace, love and happiness in the world, others to gain fame, companies do it to lower development cost, or for financial gain etc. Who is to say which it is the 'right' purpose?
/Henri Karapuu
Henri, I did not mention right or wrong. I am not making a value judgment, merely an observation. I never mentioned conspiracy either. I was merely expressing an opinion that not for profit Free Software projects tend to serve their communities better.
I guess this may be a wild over generalisaton, but then again I might be right. Time will tell.
Paul.
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Message #245515
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Re: Download Statistics
Henri, I did not mention right or wrong. I am not making a value judgment, merely an observation. I never mentioned conspiracy either. I was merely expressing an opinion that not for profit Free Software projects tend to serve their communities better.
Always remember that whatever i write is with several tongues in my cheek -- and usually also with intention to provoke.. ..So no, you did not imply any Conspiracies, value judgments etc. Sorry about that.
Nonetheless, my personal experiences with open source software don't reflect yours.
To me it seems that the 'best', in terms of code quality, documentation and support, projects are in fact those that run under relatively strict control and have paid developers. The 'not for profit' and 'own itch' aspect seems to relate more to the feel and community of the project than quality, imo.
But, off for beer, have a great weekend.
/Henri Karapuu
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Message #245517
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Re: OC4J
I think it might be too late to jettison OC4J because that is the foundation of their Fusion platform, especially for 11g, which not only Java EE applications will rely on but also pure play acquisitions that will also leverage it.
Oracle says you can deploy Fusion in WLS, JBoss and maybe others...
The big trouble with Oracle solutions is everything bound to a relational database to make them operable. For a tiny thing, you deploy a Jumbo attached to monsters databases!! A lot hell money for training, people, hardware, software, support, consulting.
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Message #245520
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Re: Download Statistics
off for beer, have a great weekend.
/Henri Karapuu
Hi Henri,
Thanks. I take your point about quality, especially when it comes to documentation.
Enjoy the Beer, especially if its Free.
Cheers,
Paul.
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Message #245522
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I don't understand this ...
I am confused about this common practice in open source business. This is how I view it:
1. We start out to solve a common pain point.
2. Get popularity because it’s a noble (non-profit?) cause
3. Start collecting donation. Time … Money … Credit Card … Check “We accept all”. Ask people to donate their spare (free?) time to enrich the product.
4. On the first opportunity … sell the product to a huge software giant whose sole purpose is to generate profit for their investor. Along goes this noble cause, the goodwill, … the entire donation we received … the very thing that built the “product”. Do all the contributors even know before deal is finalized?
If the answer is no, then IMO that is called “stealing”.
Someone please help me understand.
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Message #245583
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GlassFish Download Statistics (partial)
In December we had at least 432K completed downloads by our count. We switched to a new reporting software and I am guestimating at least an undercount of 50K but I'll let you know when we get that resolved.
These numbers include downloads directly from GlassFish as well as the Java EE SDK and the NetBeans bundles that include GlassFish (not all NB bundles include it). These numbers do not include Ubuntu or OpenSolaris downloads.
Comparing download numbers is a bit of apples and oranges; so we also track the trend and that has been growing very consistently; we are currently in a rate of at least 4M per year (we start counting in July); that is up from about 3M last year. We usually report yearly downloads around JavaOne.
Download numbers are not as important as actual adoption and that is even harder to track with any accuracy. We can approximate this in different ways; check http://blogs.sun.com/theaquarium/tags/adoption for some metrics, but we are working on improving that. Again, these metrics are most useful as indicators and trends are useful; we are seeing very strong increases in the trend.
We are in the process of pushing the download statistics out in some public site; we will announce that at TheAquarium when it is ready.
Hope this helps,
- eduard/o
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Message #245656
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Re: OC4J
OC4J is still very immature, once you get beyond the marketing hype around the whole 10gAS package. And it has next to no market share.
This is one reason why Oracle bought BEA, because they were not achieving market penetration with their own, rather primitive JEE container.
I think OC4J will die, we will end up with Weblogic plus some oracle-sourced options...
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Message #245710
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Download Statistics
Surely the only statistic worth a damn is "number of support licenses purchased".
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Message #245735
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Re: Download Statistics
Surely the only statistic worth a damn is "number of support licenses purchased".
That statistic won't work for Open Source Software... MySQL was worth $1B to Sun. Sun is investing heavily in GlassFish. Tomcat is used heavily for both web and enterprise applications. GlassFish, JBoss and Tomcat servers in production are very meaningful. Download statistics are less meaningful, but still indicative of something (although no one is really sure what).
Is "number of support licenses purchased" meaningful for those products?
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Message #248501
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Re: I don't understand this ...
I am confused about this common practice in open source business. This is how I view it:
1. We start out to solve a common pain point.
2. Get popularity because it’s a noble (non-profit?) cause
3. Start collecting donation. Time … Money … Credit Card … Check “We accept all”. Ask people to donate their spare (free?) time to enrich the product.
4. On the first opportunity … sell the product to a huge software giant whose sole purpose is to generate profit for their investor. Along goes this noble cause, the goodwill, … the entire donation we received … the very thing that built the “product”. Do all the contributors even know before deal is finalized?
If the answer is no, then IMO that is called “stealing”.
Someone please help me understand.
That's because of the $1M T-shirt! (http://blog.milkingthegnu.org/2008/03/1-million-dolla.html)
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