Kurian discussed the roadmap for JDK 7 and JDK 8, which will be based on OpenJDK

“In addition, Oracle remains committed to OpenJDK as the the best open source Java implementation and we will continue to improve OpenJDK and welcome external contributors.”
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/173712

“Oracle will work with the OpenJDK code base and the OpenJDK community
like Sun did. We will continue to develop the JDK in the open under a
GPL license. We welcome the cooperation and contribution of any member
of the community – individuals as well as organizations – who would
like to be part of moving the most widely used software platform
forward.”

http://blogs.oracle.com/henrik/

Well, it seems that another piece of the Sun OSS portfolio has floated adrift from the Oracle mother-ship. Some of the key developers have left / are leaving Oracle and have joined Rackspace. With this Rackspace essentially becomes the guardian of one of the major development branches of MySQL. It would be interesting to know what Oracle would price their MySQL assets at today.

DZone: With Oracle’s acquisition of Sun, are you concerned at all about some of the potential changes that will come as a result, to the governance and licensing options to the OpenJDK?

Rich: I’m really not that concerned. There are all sorts of scenarios that people are suggesting. I still believe Oracle will do the right thing. They have far too much to lose, by either accidently or purposely sabotaging OpenJDK. They have a very healthy business based around Java. Creating unrest, creating any kind of distrust or fragmentation of the Java community really isn’t going to help Oracle. So I think they’ll do the right thing. I also think they probably have the ability to invest in Java more than Sun had over the last five years at least. Sun kind of had some fairly pressing financial issues. I think that, above all else, probably hindered some of the progress of Java over the last five years.

So overall, I’m coming in neutral to slightly optimistic. If things do go awry, I’m sure Red Hat the rest of the Java community will step up and help Oracle to get back on track. So, yeah, I’m pretty comfortable with it.

My only real concerns is that Oracle understands products and monetization much better than they understand community and collaboration so I think a misstep or two are more likely to occur than Oracle purposefully sabotaging Java. Harming Java will devalue their investment and their chances of getting a decent return.

On the positive side – I think there’s still huge growth potential for the Java platform – I see no reason why it can’t become the dominant standard for the enterprise – I personally think we’re at the start of the decline of Microsoft and Java is the only viable alternative to Microsoft’s enterprise foothold. Microsoft’s enterprise presence is not insignificant but neither is it guaranteed – it’s largely based on an historically well adopted OS and Microsoft’s missteps in that area are pretty well known by now .

Java needs some strong leadership, investment and a open, vibrant and growing community.

I raising my mug of tea to The Next Decade of Java !

JBoss AS 5.1 GA has been released. Downloads are looking pretty healthy and it’s good to see almost monthly releases now that the MC / re-architecture work is behind us. Release early, release often …

It’s Java One time again, JBoss’ presence this year will probably be larger than last year – we have a lot to talk about and show – so swing by our sessions, our booths and join us at the JBoss Party. See you there – and follow @JBossNews on twitter for the latest Java One updates.

Sun seem to be getting increasingly desperate to build a business around their Java middleware – they’re attacking companies a fraction of a fraction of their size and continuing the fire sale. It’s going to be really interesting when Sun product lines get hit with Larry Ellison’s “fiduciary responsibility” stick. Weblogic wasn’t exactly cheap – and Oracle had to pile on a pretty hefty Tax to bring it in line with Oracle’s cost model. The disparity between Sun and Oracle pricing is *huge* and is going to require something more dramatic than a a mere 30% price increase.

Although Java One hasn’t started yet – for all the folks involved in planning and preparing – the work is (or should be) done. At Red Hat we already have our sight on the biggest Red Hat / JBoss event of the year – the co-located Red Hat Summit and JBoss World 2009 which is in Chicago, Septemer 1st to 4th.

JBoss App Server 5.1.0 CR1 – 5.1 is a pretty big milestone – it includes the new Jopr powered embedded console  – something you’ll like but also something we really need some early feedback on. Also a preview of Web Beans / JSR-299. [release notes, downloads]

Data Integration goes Open Source – I missed the launch of the Teiid Project you can find out more on the project page.

This has been brewing for a while and Manik has finally announced Infinispan – I predict that this is going to  be a pretty disruptive technology. [home page, quick guide]

JBoss Tattletale is a new tool that will analyze your code and produce detailed dependency reports – for example highlighting duplicate jars / classes, missing jars / classes, etc. [downloads, project]

The latest release of Jopr (2.2) is out – Jopr is the upstream project for JBoss Operations Network (see below). There are a shedload of UI enhancements, support for JBoss EWS and Performance improvements among other things.

Also a nice article on JBoss Cloud over on DZone.

On the JBoss Enterprise side of the house :

JBoss Operations Network 2.2 is out and JON receives a pretty decent makeover (see Greg’s post on some of the major enhancements) – product page is here.

One of the new capabilities of JON 2.2 is support for JBoss Enterprise Web Server (EWS) which was also released a few weeks ago – more on that in a future post.

If you’re currently stuck with Oracle Weblogic or IBM Websphere and need help getting off – here’s an opportunity you can’t ignore.

Sorry for the length of this post – I need to do this more frequently. The next couple of months are going to be even more hectic and you can follow the @JBossNews via Twitter. Finally, something from the happy news files – we’re still hiring.

The things I care about are the people I know who still work for Sun, the Java ecosystem, and many of Sun’s Open Source projects that I directly or indirectly benefit from – specifically MySQL (this post will live in MySQL), OpenJDK and OpenOffice.

It still seems like a strange merger – sure, Sun and Oracle have a huge shared installed based – Sun Servers + Solaris + BEA + Oracle DBMS was the killer enterprise stack for a decade – that alone gives Oracle a vice-like grip on existing customers; but that’s about the past – not the future. I think someone did the analysis and realized it’s a marginally positive move – so I don’t think this is the big technology vision realized that Oracle are trying to promote.

I’m sure a lot of people at Sun and customers of Sun are glad the uncertainty has come to an end but unfortunately it hasn’t. I’m guessing that it will take until the end of the year before Oracle tells the world what they’re keeping and what they’re dropping. FWIW – here’s my informed guess :

Storage / Servers – the press-briefing made the merger sound like it was all about the hardware (servers and storage). I just don’t see Oracle as a hardware company and they have more to loose than gain by pissing HP off. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some or all the hardware got sold off to HP, Fujitsu, etc. And I think Oracle could probably recover $3.5-4 bn of their $5bn outlay by doing so.

NetBeans – I’m not changing my mind – it’s done for. Oracle has two Java IDEs already – they don’t need a third. Oracle will pick up some great tools developers to write a migration tool but that’s about it.

OpenOffice – Oracle doesn’t like M$ but I doubt they can find a fiscally rational reason to carry the torch for Open Source and at the end of the day Oracle are doing this because it makes financial sense. I think Oracle will expect “the community” to pick up the slack.

Solaris – I think they’ll milk the legacy installed base (which is huge) but the innovation won’t continue. I think there’s an interesting opportunity for Oracle to manage the migration of the last of the Solaris holdouts to Linux. They could do this by GPLing Solaris and moving some of the Solaris features to Linux; or more likely to an Oracle proprietary OS built on Linux.

Middleware – Oracle have everything Sun has – and Oracle are by and large market leaders with large market and revenue share. Sun have one or two products that might survive and certainly some components. Oracle inherit a commitment to continue to produce the Java EE RI (and others) so Glassfish *might* survive – but Oracle have demonstrated that they don’t have appetite to maintain many products in the same market (see how quickly OC4J got killed after the BEA acquisition ?)

MySQL – I think Oracle will continue to do what Sun did somewhat accidentally – namely slowly kill it off.

Java – I’m confident that Oracle won’t fix the JCP and won’t sacrifice control for the good of the ecosystem. I also think the JCP will become a battlefield for IBM and Oracle and we’ll all be the worse for it.

OpenJDK – no-body needs two JDK’s to maintain – I think Oracle would have to move some of the monitoring / diagnostics from JRockit into a proprietary OpenJDK-based platform. JRockit has a small market share but some nice features for enterprise customers.

Cloud – not that there’s much there there but I don’t expect to see Larry eating his words.

Virtualization – I don’t really understand Oracle’s virtualization strategy other than the feeling that Larry Ellison is unlikely to entertain anything that looks like it might actually save customers money on licenses.

OpenLogic have the results of a survey on Open Source web / application servers. The only surprise is Spring’s DM Server appearing so quickly – I actually thought it might take longer to get traction given the amount of competition in this space. Glassfish is also making good progress.

37% Tomcat
26% JBoss
18% GlassFish
4% Geronimo
3% Caucho Resin
3% SpringSource DM
1% Jetty
0% JOnAS
7% Other

Compare the competition and acivity with the Proprietary space – just 2 vendors trying to maintain their relevance and support revenue stream. Interestingly – the major impediment to adoption cited in the survey is “Robustness/scalability/performance”. Interesting because that’s often one of the reasons many of our reference customers move to JBoss. I’ll write a fuller response to this survey next week when I’m out of vacation mode.

I’ve lost track of how many “predictions for 2009″ I’ve read but they nearly all claim that the world-wide recesion will be a catalyst for open source adoption; many of them mention JBoss as the poster child for Open Source displacing encumbent, proprietary alternatives. Here’s one such quote from Dr. Dobb’s Roger Burkhardt :

… traditional companies like Oracle to actually raise prices during the economic downturn. The company’s 45 percent increase on its BEA acquired-WebLogic application server, for instance, is causing customer migration to JBoss’ open source enterprise application server“

Finally – I know it’s some time off but you might want to put JBoss World 2009 in your calendat – it’s in Chicago on September 1-3rd. And next month we have the JBoss Virtual Experience – an online conference for JBoss Developers, Customers, Users.

IBM’s WebSphere application server is now ten years old, and during that time, it has evolved and matured into what its users think of as the best application server anywhere, but most especially in the large enterprise market where IBM has traditionally had its home. Make no mistake about it, WebSphere is a powerhouse in many ways, and its users truly love this
product.

Fantastic – already written in press-ready language – could be lifted and dropped straight into a press release. So good – it could have been written by Websphere’s marketing team themselves !

OK, by now you think you’ve seen through by thinly veiled blast at EDC’s report. You think I’m bitter because JBoss came in 5th (out of eight). Right ?

Well hold on. Though I have some issues with the report which I’ll get to – JBoss actually did very well – after all we beat Weblogic – which is no small feat. And there are other bits of the report worth highlighting. Here’s one quote I like which enforces what many other analysts are saying about JBoss and something that differentiates us from our Open Source brethren :

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform competes with Oracle’s Application Server, WebLogic, and IBM’s WebSphere in the high-end market for large corporate applications. The recent acquisition of BEA by Oracle may provoke some consternation and uncertainty amongst the end users of both WebLogic and Oracle AS, which in turn provides an opportunity for both JBoss and IBM.

And another that demonstrates that JBoss is focussed on our customer’s highest priorities :

JBoss really shone in the areas of security where users gave it the best ratings of any product in the survey, compatibility with other software, and the very important value to cost ratio.

The second point is worth repeating, given the economic situation we find ourselves in – JBoss had the best value to cost ratio.

So I’m actually not bitter – if you’re the underdog competing with some significantly larger competitors – this kind of validation is golden and It shows that JBoss is till punching way above it’s weight. I’m not bitter but my spidey-senses are tingling; there’s something just not right about this report.

Methodoloy

I find EDC’s methodology odd. It’s not clear how many responses were received for each question or for each vendor. For example you would expect to see many responses for Windows Server 2003 vs something like NetWeaver (which isn’t quite as main stream) – the number of responses is significant both statistically and as a proxy for adoption / acceptance.

Bucks the general consensus

The results just don’t seem right. I’ve worked for 2 of the vendors on the list (previously Sun and currently Red Hat) and know the other vendors really well having been involved in this space for as long as anyone. Though I trust my instinct – that isn’t good enough so let’s compare some other data. Forrester recently released a report (also based on a user survey) covering some aspects of the EDC report.  In that report WAS 6 did significantly better than WAS 5  but generally scored lower than JBoss. For example :

The EDC report doesn’t correlate with the summary points of the recent Burton report on JBoss. Also it doesn’t correlate with our own (sponsored) satisfaction surveys (like this). I find it strange that WAS scores so well and Weblogic scores so badly – putting them in seventh plance out of eight just seems a little too extreme and a little to convenient. I’ve yet to personally meet a Websphere customer who says good things about WAS – maybe I only meet the customers who’ve already decided to move to JBoss ?

Third – I talk to customers every week and Red Hat’s sales team a couple of times a day and I just don’t see Geronimo mentioned at all – few if any user satisfaction surveys actually call out Geronimo – what was it about these respondents that give them an unrepresentative affinity towards Geronimo ? I just don’t understand why Geronimo is in the survey.

So a couple of request to EDC – 1. open up the unfettered results; 2. provide a little more detail on the methodology; and 3.  confirm that this was a purely independent survey that wasn’t paid for or unduly influenced by any of the vendors included in the survey.

You can now catch up with videos from the JBoss community about JBoss people and technology on YouTube, blip.tv and Streamocracy,

Tha VAR Guy on Red Hat, desktop Linux and JBoss middleware.

Red Hat’s JBoss business hits overdrive. Matt Asay of c|net interviews my boss – Craig Muzilla (VP of Marketing for the JBoss division).

JBoss Tools 3.0 Alpha has been released – see Max’s blog posting for details.

Finally (and this isn’t specifically about JBoss) – theres an opinion piece in CIO magazine by Bernard Golden which suggests that SAP and Oracle have basically run out of ideas and innovation and are just milking their customers for everything they can.

If you are an Oracle or former BEA middleware customer and are still uncertain which products Oracle will shit-can – well it seems that Oracle doesn’t know either but they are letting you vote. I applaud the democratic proces but isn’t this the kind of detail you work out before spending $6bn of your shareholder’s money ?

[Update]

The poll doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Oracle – it’s sponsored by TechTarget – I have no idea why. They seem to have made the decision already – according to the Register.

Finally – can you please get off Yahoo’s case about departing execs. – this is just mean