June 10, 2003
java.net goes live
Seems like Sun started its own platform for hosted community-based collaborative thingies. It's a mixture of O'Reilly's weblog software, Collab.net Sourcecast, and TWiki - and I'm pretty sure many people will try to move from Sourceforge to java.net for more intimate Java-bonding. I registered and scanned the click-through legalese, and it seems like a pretty fair deal to me. It's good to see they moved JavaCC and some other stuff to java.net to bootstrap the community - and changed the license while they were at it.Aside from Sourceforge and Savannah, mature projects will now have to deliberate whether they want to be a java.net or (Jakarta) ASF project. I'm wondering whether apache.org will still be regarded as the ultimate graduation path for OSS projects who want to belong to a greater family. The important thing is that large business start to care about OSS activities around their core technology. Whether that is to embrace and extinguish, remains to be seen. If that would be the case (although I don't think so), it's good to know the ASF is still there as a independent safe harbour.
Update: in case you want to know who the Community Manager is behind java.net, it's John Bobowicz - Chief Technical Strategist and one of the Sun execs who was interviewed many times during the turmoil around Sun's membership of WS-I.