July 03, 2003
BEA's XMLBeans going open source?
It's funny to see how opinions can change over time - mine in the first place. Earlier this year, I was apparently still believing that the JCP might serve Java users well, but after some more months of hearing about the Sun Open Source FUD, and seeing how good, honest proposals are purposedly being held back and some stupid ones are being approved, I decided the JCP and effectively all Sun-involved community efforts are essentially doomed. Even Simon is making a clown of himself, hopelessly trying to be one of the pack, with all his A-list blogger hyping, and blogging about blogging or the new passing fad in town social software. Let's be serious: software can't be social, how could a computer program be considered to be anything near-human? Even a bunch of bonobos expose more group behaviour than a cluster of bytes on a hard disk.Anyway: during XML Europe, I had the pleasure of talking to Cliff Schmidt. He was new to BEA, coming from M$, and apparently on target to bring some open source and community clue into BEA. And even though the first announcements of said XMLBeans weren't exactly heartily welcomed in my very own little blog, Cliff proved to be really serious, and actually caring about BEA doing Open Source good. We exchanged quite a few lengthy emails over the past two months, and now he went public with his XMLBeans proposal on the Apache lists. I won't interfere with the debate, since that's how the game should be played, but Cliff is standing up pretty well so far.
It would be cool to see BEA being added to one of the large software companies working on Apache projects - diversity is good!
Comments
Sorry you don't like what I'm writing - do you really think my content and style has changed? I do wonder if you've just been reading the cross-postings to java.net or whether the stuff in the main blog has been drifting past as well - I'm not sure I have ever used the phrase 'social software' as it's not one I believe in, and I seem to recall making fun of blogging about blogging recently....
What is it about my (positive) position on open source you don't like? Do you disagree that Echo could hint at the future of specification activity? That's it's import in my eyes, not the fact it's blogging related.
Posted by: Simon Phipps at July 4, 2003 02:13 AM