Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
A fine quote from Johnathan's Keynote today: "There is a social utility to free software"

Johnathan's core message is that FOSS is good for business by bringing new people into relationships and creating a greater need and thus opportunity to provide infrastructure. It made sense to me. Instead of build it and they will come, this is provide them free software and they will buy your hardware and services to support it.

"There is no downside to FOSS", he also said. Hard to say. There is one to your competitor or the guy that competes against an open source project. No downside for Sun in the products like Glass Fish, JXTA, Open Office, NetBeans and others. If we saw Microsoft FOSS Office, would that be good or bad for OpenOffice?

Opening the Application Server

Open sourcing of the Sun application server was a big deal. The code is hosted at Java.net at: GlassFish) Some argue that Sun is not great at software. It is however great at supporting community creation of software. This now means a huge shift in the landscape. JBOSS was becoming a clear leader because we developers choose products we know.

How are our software product preferebes made? We know tools that we can afford to use. That's why JBOSS was popular. Download, install, and run but even better, whatever you can do with JBOSS you know you can afford to deploy it with JBOSS. So, free and I know my investment of time won't be erased by the cost of buying a $50,000 dollar app server license. Sun's application server can now play this same game.

Sun does have a second advantage. Sun has a lot of support and of course the prepackaged solution. That means when you are ready to pay for professional support, it is there.

Seems like Jonathan is pretty smart from my point of view.

I Sun a threat to JBOSS? Is JBOSS in trouble? Yes and no\, there is a lot of col and wonderful stuff in JBOSS. It was built by a group of guys with staggering intelligence. The question is that if Sun's application server is open source, how long before it has incorporated JBOSS innovations. Stay tuned.

But this is also a big win for education. Believe it or not, universities don't run on 100% open source. Like any business, a university needs reliability and support. But universities also need to build and innovate applications. Now there is no issue to a student of university employee or professor to get Sun's server and do cool things that may get ported to the university's professionally supported infrastructure. This reduces startup and supports student projects and adds future security when the application becomes mission critical.

I have trouble seeing a downside here. The only real issue is if Sun has open and closed source. If you have watched NetBeans and Forte, Forte lagged in its release cycle quite a bit. The result is when faced with free software that is up to date, they are going to select the free software. If Sun can support the open source source and shrink wrapped, they won't have an issue.

What do you think about releasing GlassFish? Is it the right thing to do? Is it Genius. I want to know what you are thinking?