Re: [OT] Is Sun dead?

Hi Kalali,

I have to disagree a little with you only in regards to the future of NB and
other of Sun's Open Source offerings. The way I see it, because they are
open sourced they cannot be un-open sourced by IBM. That's what an Open
Source license does- it stops people who would want to kill the project from
being able to do so.

Given that as a background, I don't have the break down regarding the number
of people who work on NB who are paid by Sun vs the number of people who are
funded by other means. Clearly NB has a substantial website that someone
pays to have people work on and someone pays the ISP bill for all those
downloads. But there are a  LOT of companies who use NB and the platform. If
IBM screws with the community, then we're legally entitled to fork NB and
continue development and technically and probably financially capable of
continuing the online community.

Do you know what the break down of developers paid by Sun vs the number of
developers who aren't is? I don't have any kind of visibility to that
information.

What do you think? Sure some good projects go begging on Apache's site, but
I don't se that happening here at all.

regards.


On Thu, Mar 19, 2009 at 7:25 AM, Masoud Kalali <[email protected]> wrote:

> epdv wrote:
> >
> > Hello!
> >
> > I've got to read this:
> > http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123735124997967063.html ("IBM in Talks
> > to Buy Sun in Bid to Add To Web Heft"). So, will Sun be part of IBM?
> > Will it probably no more exist? If IBM will aquire Sun - will NetBeans
> > engagement be terminated?
> >
> > Kind regards
> >
> > Peter
> >
> >
> Hi Peter,
>
> If the take over happens and IBM buys Sun:
>
> Sun as Sun for its customers will live through as IBM is looking to take
> over Sun's customer base and provide them with support and charge them
> with big $$$ which probably Sun is/was unable to do.
>
> No one knows what will happen to NetBeans and rest of Open Source
> projects which are sponsored by Sun Microsystems.
>
> Best prediction is that IBM keep most Open Source product and push them
> as a well integrated, high performance open source bundle for its
> customer and charge them $$$$ for service and support.
>
> Worst prediction is that most of these projects end up orphan and die in
> Apache incubator or somewhere else.
>
> I blogged about this at
> http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kalali/archive/2009/03/ibm_in_talks_to.html
>
> Masoud.
>
> --
> Masoud Kalali
> Author of GlassFish in Action
> http://www.manning.com/kalali/
>
> Software Engineer and Developer
> http://weblogs.java.net/blog/kalali/
>
> Netbeans Community and Dream Team Member:
> http://wiki.netbeans.org/wiki/view/NetBeansDreamTeam
>