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Clone NetBeans, Glassfish, OpenJDK, MySQL?

Posted by mriem on April 25, 2009 at 7:32 AM PDT

I wonder if it is time to clone all the important open source repositories, like NetBeans, Glassfish, OpenJDK, MySQL, OpenOffice and the like? Do you have any thoughts, feeling, or just want to sound off? I think it would be a smart move to host it separate from a corporate entity, but what do you think?

Should the community foster hosting each of these major projects as separate legal entities, much like FreeBSD and PostgreSQL? I think so, but do you think so too?

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Comments

by whartung - 2009-04-27 14:21

Couple of things. Glassfish is here on java.net, so there's a deeper issue about the future of java.net. Arguably it would be nice if someone outside of Sun had "the passwords" to respective java.net communities. I think the loss of the mailing lists, in fact the entirety of the java.net sites (and I'm speaking mostly of the huge Glassfish community -- metro, openesb, grizzly, etc. etc.), would be generally horrible as there is simply a huge amount of documentation, as well as the bug base. I think all of those would be worthwhile to a cloning effort, not simply just the source code.

by fabriziogiudici - 2009-04-27 02:54

@kawazu Good point. For NetBeans, I think that is has been "unofficially" told more than one time, in various mailing list and blogs, that "we won't" make NetBeans and NetBeans Platform to disappear, whatever this could mean.

by eingfoan - 2009-04-26 11:19

i also thought about such a thing. it would really be a pitty when things like openmq openesb opensso opends and the like would dissapear. i personally have the sourcecode of most of the mentioned projects... just to be safe... but i agree. it will be hard for those projects. decision makers / developers will not use those projects when the roadmap by oracle is not decided. at least i would not... tho whome it may concern gartner says it like this: http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=167660&ref=g_homelink regards chris

by mriem - 2009-04-26 07:28

I'd personally prefer the community to be self sustaining, so not something like Apache and/or Codehause. One community for one product looks a lot better in my book. Both Apache and Codehaus have become more like Sourceforge and Google Code than anything. A wholly dedicated foundation to one thing is better!

by kawazu - 2009-04-26 01:33

Asides this, what I forgot: Yes, having these projects separated from a company and maintained in some foundation or community like approach (Apache? Codehaus? ...?) seems to be the very solution to deal with those situations in the future. K.

by kawazu - 2009-04-26 01:31

Maybe the communities, if doing so already, however should be more, well, "communicative" in terms of what they intend to do when (if?) Oracle might decide to axe the project / product they're involved with. Right now, I see a lot of interested people staying away especially from Glassfish and NetBeans right for this reasons, and this surely hurts. Knowing that there would be some "effort" of cloning, forking and reviving these projects ultimately would make this a little easier... Cheers, Kristian

by fabriziogiudici - 2009-04-25 13:16

You can bet that several people from the related communities have cloned the repos since when the first IBM rumors started. Just for safety. I think that the communities should get ready - but let's wait for news from the new Sun owner.