Will Oracle support NetBeans?
By now you know that Oracle intends to purchase Sun. It’s a welcome deal that will no doubt be approved by stockholders. It certainly has the board’s approval. So let’s assume that Oracle will own Sun by the end of summer. Now we can start asking some questions.
Will Oracle embrace NetBeans? Like many open source projects, NetBeans gets a lot of support from corporate interest. In this case, it’s no secret that Sun pours cash into NetBeans. However, Oracle already supports an IDE. Let’s make that two IDEs: JDeveloper and Eclipse. Both receive financial backing from Oracle already, and…well, my first thought is that Oracle simply won’t need a third IDE.
As Oracle continues to evaluate its new assets, how will it value NetBeans? Although I personally enjoy and use NetBeans, I don’t think Oracle will care much for it. Not that NetBeans isn’t an excellent product, but like I said, Oracle already has IDEs. In my opinion, NetBeans and its users will have to find new support elsewhere. I doubt Oracle will continue funding its development.
Hey, this is just speculation. I’d enjoy hearing your ideas, particularly if you think that Oracle will champion NetBeans in the future.
I have collected some of my general thoughts on that in [1]. Indeed Oracle will have little desire to support three different IDEs. But however, as someone who’s also playing with JDeveloper once in a while, and be that out of mere interest, I have to say that despite some advanced features (nested projects view comes to my mind), JDeveloper is years behind NetBeans in many respects at very least in terms of the set of technology supported out of the box – being a maven2 long term user, in example, I still then and now remember how utterly horrid using maven2 with JDeveloper still is. Same goes for supporting a variety of application servers, development frameworks, … . Looking back at the BEA acquisition, Oracle prove a good deal of talent in deciding which BEA products to axe and which of their own products to replace with “superior” alternatives provided by BEA. Adding to this, JDeveloper community seems next to non-existant so I hope the existence of NetBeans community, the chance for Oracle to, this way, also reach a whole new set of potential customers might help making a smart decision (pro NetBeans, contra JDeveloper?) here. Whether or not, looking at Oracles overall business doings, this would be per se good for NetBeans being an open source community eventually is another story. Maybe just moving all these projects (Glassfish, NetBeans, OpenDS, …) off elsewhere, say, Apache Software Foundation or Codehaus simply would be the best choice…
Cheers,
Kristian
[1] http://dm.zimmer428.net/index.php/archives/450
IMHO, NetBeans is still going to flourish while existing community is big enough while JDeveloper mindshare is very little.
I imagine JDeveloper+NetBeans to merge (all IDEs are Swing-based), while NetBeans being the company-neutral stub and JDeveloper being proposed as NetBeans+Oracle stuff (like Oracle ADF – Oracle Application Development Framework).
IMHO Netbeans is years ahead of their open source competitors. So even if they cut off Netbeans development right now, it will continue to be a solid IDE for a few years. That said, I hope they can JDeveloper and make its best parts plugins into Netbeans.
I haven’t heard of JDeveloper until now, definitely because of my lack of experience with Oracle. It seems to me the greatest dilemna for Oracle will probably be how much support to give Eclipse and their soon-to-be “very own” IDE, NetBeans. Scaling down JDeveloper and directing the best ideas of this IDE to NetBeans or/and Eclipse shouldn’t be such a hard decision to make.
Why invest in some unknown IDE as JDeveloper, or continue to support rivals Eclipse? Everyone connects Eclipse with IBM. If you have the opportunity to have your own IDE which is by the way superior to his biggest competitor, would you choose just to kill it? It does not make sense to me. So from my point of view NetBeans will definetelly continue to exist but the question is what part of it will stay free. I am mostly worried about the Glassfish, OpennSSO, Portal Server, Project Mural and OpenESB Projects.
Netbeans can go toe-to-toe with Eclipse and come out on top. And it works right out of the box; Eclipse not always so much — has installation tweaking hardships. Why would Oracle hand IDE dominance to IBM by killing its most recognized rival? If anything, it should bring more support to Netbeans and channel the JDeveloper base into a Netbeans upgrade path. Now MySQL, that’s a different situation!
I love netbeans. In my opinion, it’s better and more friendly than Eclipse. JDev, on the other hand, have a robust jsf visual support, better than netbeans. So, I want to see the best of both worlds merged. I want to see ICEFaces on “Jbeans” and I want to have all this as open source. Glassfish, too. So Oracle, don’t kill this idea.
Eclipse was IBM’s way of flipping Sun the bird (get the joke? Eclipse? Blots out the Sun?), especially considering the way it tries to replace Swing with SWT. Now, considering how important Eclipse’s success is to IBM, attacking Eclipse and supporting NetBeans would be a sound strategic move by Oracle. I think Mr. Ellison may be willing to go this route, since IBM is one of Oracle’s main competitors in the database and app server markets. As a side benefit, Oracle would gain a lot of goodwill in the open source community, they’d have a nice open source project in their portfolio, and they could lump it in with MySQL in an offering targeted at small websites and businesses, a market that so far hasn’t been able to afford Oracle software.
I think Oracle is going to want to keep Sun’s application server around as well; remember when they tried to buy JBoss and Red Hat scooped them? Now they have something that might be better than JBoss. If anything, it’s a score, not something to be dropped. Glassfish is probably going to be supported I think.
Well, but it’s known that the ultimate thing that determins decisions is the ego of bosses and marketing, company-wide Public Relations. So, an assumption that a technically sound decision is preferred to a stuped, shoot in my leg style, decision, is just plain wrong in a corporate world.
My guess: the result is probably like it would be, if a coin were flipped.