Kirill Grouchnikov's Blog

Teach a man how to fish and you'll sell him your fishing equipment for the next five years

Comments

• I'm admittedly a little biased and I do see where you are going, however I think two of the arguments you use here need to be addressed.
  "something basic for free - like JRockit VM" - I hardly think an entire JVM, a pretty good one at that, is "something basic". Especially since you can run what you like on it. Where's the hook?
  Likewise, this is an entire EJB 3.0 engine. Presumably the folk who want to use EJB 3.0 don't have to use JDO 2.0, so where's the hook?
  

  Posted by: jonmountjoy on February 15, 2006 at 12:49 AM

• Jon,
  In the world of Java the VM is something basic. The hook is that once you start using the features that are specific to JRockit (they sound very good), you're kind of hooked to that specific VM, since no other VM gives you that. Guess what - these features aren't free (unless you're prepared to restart every hour).
  The EJB 3.0 vs. JDO 2.0 - this is somewhat less intrusive (much in vein of XMLBeans). It goes something like "Here's a free and very useful piece of code from our company. If you like it, we have additional pieces of code from our company that are of the same quality that you can purchase." Nothing wrong with that, it's just that the big companies tend to be very conservative about taking products from different places. Once your IT department is OK with something that you took from BEA (like XMLBeans or EJB 3.0 implementation), you'll have hard time to justify evaluation and adoption of a product from another company when BEA has the product that sounds very much like it.

  Posted by: kirillcool on February 15, 2006 at 01:07 AM

• It's very nice to read someone who looks at vendor announcements and tell us what's inside, instead of simply "whoa, the vendor gave us more free stuff!". Usually developers and users (and the media) forget that sometimes the vendor's interests are not the same as user's and developer's.

  Posted by: flozano on February 16, 2006 at 07:28 AM

• Hi Kirill,

  I would (and just wouldn't I ;) ) argue some of the details of your point, particularly in relation to us (JGraph) and probably JGoodies too. When you say we give something away and then charge for the tools, I don't follow this line of thinking for these two projects. Both projects give away, freely, completely usable libraries. In the case of JGraph, since there has been commercial products developed under the JGraph umbrella, nothing has been removed from the community and JGraph has only benefitted from the commercial involvement during the 5.x version series (which caused 80-90% of the work done on the library). The alternative would be, we sell nothing, no developers work on the project full-time, we'd still be on JGraph 5.1, no User Manual would have been written, and for those users willing to pay, no layouts or application framework. And you don't need the pay-for products to use JGraph, JGraph has everything you need, they just speed up development.

  I think the issue to focus on is whether or not the community benefits from the model adopted by a project. And, to be honest, I think the suggestion that we make it difficult for users to progress with JGraph without buying additional software is disingenuous. Have you used JGraph and found this to be the case?

  Thanks,

  David

  Posted by: jgraph on February 19, 2006 at 02:29 AM

• David,

  I didn't use JGraph (i used JUNG) and here's the main reason. I came up to the project page and saw that the documentation was not free. This immediately made me think that if people are willing to pay for documentation, then it would take too much time to figure the correct way to use the library on your own. This may be incorrect, but that's what i thought. The commercial development may be very beneficiary to the whole community (see JBoss or JGoodies for example), but it just turned a red flag on in my head. That's why i went off to JUNG. I just didn't have enough time to invest in the library that doesn't come up with complete free documentation and examples.
  

  Posted by: kirillcool on February 20, 2006 at 02:50 AM

• That's a reasonable assumption, that's why the User Manual is now free.

  Posted by: jgraph on February 25, 2006 at 02:36 AM

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