Oracle Kills Commercial Support For GlassFish: Was It Inevitable?

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle acquired GlassFish when it acquired Sun Microsystems, and now — like OpenSolaris and OpenOffice — the company has announced it will no longer support a commercial version of the product. Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation. said in an interview the decision wasn't exactly a surprise: "The only company that was putting any real investment in GlassFish was Oracle," Milinkovich said. "Nobody else was really stepping up to the plate to help. If you never contributed anything to it, you can't complain when something like this happens." An update to the open source version is still planned for 2014." GlassFish is an open source application server.

drowned

[shentino]

Sun drowned, and oracle was the shark that ate the carcass and after digesting the IP used its bulked up legal muscles to go after google.

Oracle has proven it would rather loot and pillage Sun's corpse than maintain it as a separate brand.

No way!

[Charliemopps]

Oracle bought some software company, provided shitty support for a couple of years, then complained no-one was using or contributing to it and then canceled support for it out of the blue leaving their customers that are using it screwed? eee gads! This has never happened before! Oh wait, that's right, this is what Oracle does with EVERYTHING THEY BUY.

meh

[martin-boundary]

"Nobody else was really stepping up to the plate to help. If you never contributed anything to it, you can't complain when something like this happens."

Actually, that raises the question why was it being put out there as open source in the first place? If you're only putting out an open source product _because_ you expect others to contribute, then your priorities are fucked up.

You should put it out there because it might be genuinely useful to others. Don't pollute the open source world with half baked tools that will bitrot and cause people who search for genuine free alternatives to get confused. That actually causes damage by fracturing the communities around the problem domain.

Re:WTF is Glassfish?

[TheRaven64]

There's probably a lot of truth in what you say. Banks tend to be incredibly conservative in their upgrades. I know of a couple that are just finishing their migration from FreeBSD 2.x to FreeBSD 6.x. They didn't even manage to start the upgrade to 6.x until after it was no longer supported upstream, but they pay people to backport security fixes. I know of a couple of others that still do a lot of processing on VMS on VAX, although they do have some Alpha and Itanium boxes. Outside of HFT, performance doesn't matter that much to them, but they really don't like surprises. This is why they tend to be a lot more positive about open source than you might expect from such a conservative industry: they like the idea that you can keep running an ancient platform long after the original vendor goes out of business. Transaction processing volumes grow a lot more slowly than Moore's Law, and unless they need new features they'd much rather keep using the system that they know works with occasional bug fixes when it doesn't than have to switch to something newer.