NetBeans -- It's dead, right?

[kibitzer]

With Oracle's acquisition of Sun, I can't see a future for NetBeans. I
find this extremely disturbing as (hand on heart) NetBeans is my
favourite FOSS IDE.

Am I wrong?

What does the community think?

[Jan Goyvaerts]

No way ! I don't want to loose the Dilbert Viewer plugin ! ;-)

[Fabrizio Giudici]

Any assertive statement on the future of NetBeans (as well as other Sun
products) is a purely subjective perspective, since nobody knows what
are Oracle's plans.
In my subjective point of view, NetBeans has got very good chances to
keep going on, and well, with Oracle. If it shouldn't, the community
will take over.

--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
weblogs.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/blog
Fabrizio...@tidalwave.it - mobile: +39 348.150.6941

[IngoF]

Hmm, I guess they will have a good look at both JDeveloper and
Netbeans and then
keep one of the two.
I think Netbeans might be the more popular IDE at the moment in terms
of
total market share. So that's a plus for Netbeans.
And I don't really know JDeveloper but Netbeans plugin mechanism seems
to
work really great so that's maybe a good reason to make a strategic
decision in favor
of Netbeans as well.

[Rakesh]

its available for Intellij....

[Alex Turner]

Netbeans support of other languages makes it a winner in a mixed
environment that other IDEs just don't cope with so well. I used to
use IntelliJ, and it's awesome for Java work, but I also have to deal
with a legacy PHP app and do SQL work and Python work. This makes
Netbeans the only IDE that is practical for me at this point (I've
always been shocked at how bad Eclipse is, and that the vi plugin for
it is non-free, and has HUGE bugs). I would be heartbroken if Oracle
decides to take Netbeans away, since 6.5, and now 6.7 beta are awesome
releases that make my daily work much easier and faster. I wouldn't
have even tried Netbeans again had I not heard about it on Java Posse,
and the 6.5 release, and then about 6.7 supporting Maven (we just
moved to maven).

Alex

[Jess Holle]

Alex Turner wrote:
> Netbeans support of other languages makes it a winner in a mixed
> environment that other IDEs just don't cope with so well. I used to
> use IntelliJ, and it's awesome for Java work, but I also have to deal
> with a legacy PHP app and do SQL work and Python work. This makes
> Netbeans the only IDE that is practical for me at this point (I've
> always been shocked at how bad Eclipse is, and that the vi plugin for
> it is non-free, and has HUGE bugs). I would be heartbroken if Oracle
> decides to take Netbeans away, since 6.5, and now 6.7 beta are awesome
> releases that make my daily work much easier and faster. I wouldn't
> have even tried Netbeans again had I not heard about it on Java Posse,
> and the 6.5 release, and then about 6.7 supporting Maven (we just
> moved to maven).
>

Hmm....

For a good number of folk 6.7's project scanning performance is such a
big step backwards that a 6.7 release without fixing it seems like a
sure way to make up Oracle's mind for them -- the release would kill
NetBeans for them whether they want to or not.

Otherwise, however, I agree. If the NetBeans team could focus on
actually getting this project scanning and source navigation/completion
to be as fast as possible and for scanning not to disable navigation (as
it is impossible to scan fast enough for really large projects so that
the scan time is not a noticeable stumbling block to one's work
otherwise), then I see really great things for it. There seems to be
many users on nbusers who like me have been waiting since R4 for this to
be addressed. During this time it's been at best 1 step forward and 2
back with each release (not 2 forward and 1 back, mind you. All the
other language support does not mean a thing if it stumbles on the most
basic and critical Java IDE functionality.

--
Jess Holle

[kibitzer]

I use JDeveloper daily (not by choice) and one thing it has is pretty
good support for BPEL and stuff like that. And Oracle's direction is
to make everything wizardable/configurable/deployable through the IDE.

However, the NetBeans editors really shine there (BPEL I mean) as
well. Overall it's a more modern, more fully featured, more intuitive
IDE. I would love to see it stay.

[Neil Bartlett]

Wait, I thought NetBeans was open source. How can it possibly die?

[Fabrizio Giudici]

Neil Bartlett wrote:
> Wait, I thought NetBeans was open source. How can it possibly die?
>
>

Well, an open source project CAN die if the "community" (note the
quotes) only thinks it's a great FREE project that somebody else is
giving away. While it's impossible for an open source project to
disappear (especially with the GPL license), it can just starve to die.
If the community (note the absence of quotes) understands that the real
meaning of FLOSS is "qui pro quod" and the shared ownership of a value
that everybody should take a responsibility into, the project won't
starve. Of course, for completeness, one could also discuss about the
good or bad way Sun is managing NetBeans (e.g. sometimes Sun is accused
of keeping a central control on things, jeopardizing the motivations for
others to cooperate). This is another matter; the point is that in the
scenario we're talking about Sun would be gone away and would not be an
excuse any longer.

From my point of view, I think that NetBeans has got a community,
without quotes.

[Alex Turner]

Yeah - I noticed that too, just thought it was my computer being crap,
I've had issues with HD performance anyway. I do hope they get it
fixed. It does take Netbeans a couple of minutes to start up now as
it scans in everything, but it's not a deal breaker for me at this
point. Some of the nightly builds were pretty bad, but the beta seems
okay so far from my point of view. if you wipe IntelliJ's cache it
also can take a couple of minutes to re-scan everything too, so I
guess it's not a unique problem for Netbeans.

Alex

[Vince O'Sullivan]

On May 6, 10:34 am, Neil Bartlett <njbartl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Wait, I thought NetBeans was open source. How can it possibly die?

Being open source means that it is free to consume, however it is far
from free to produce. If it is to compete with eclipse (underwritten
largely - I understand - by IBM) and IntelliJ (a paid for product
financed by its customers), then it requires (like the two products
above) a proper full-time, paid professional development team (plus an
active and enthusiastic user community). I don't think the community
on its own would be able to cut it.

[Fabrizio Giudici]

A recurring point in these discussions is that some see the "community" as purely hobbyist. Parts of the community can make profit out of their work, as it normally happens with other open source products, such as Spring. Of course, NetBeans is not as spread as Spring, I'm not thinking in the same scale. Of course it would be much different than Eclipse, that - as you said - is largely funded by IBM. Nevertheless it might happen. It could even occur that some company start providing a paying version of NetBeans, such as MyEclipse, making a business directly out of it. And of course I'm considering not only NetBeans IDE, but NetBeans Platform too, which is used by a large number of customers and integrators.

[Marcelo Morales]

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 10:59 AM, Fabrizio Giudici
<fabrizio...@tidalwave.it> wrote:
> Vince O'Sullivan wrote:
>
> On May 6, 10:34 am, Neil Bartlett <njbartl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Wait, I thought NetBeans was open source. How can it possibly die?
>
>
> Being open source means that it is free to consume, however it is far
> from free to produce. If it is to compete with eclipse (underwritten
> largely - I understand - by IBM) and IntelliJ (a paid for product
> financed by its customers), then it requires (like the two products
> above) a proper full-time, paid professional development team (plus an
> active and enthusiastic user community). I don't think the community
> on its own would be able to cut it.
>
> A recurring point in these discussions is that some see the "community" as
> purely hobbyist. Parts of the community can make profit out of their work,
> as it normally happens with other open source products, such as Spring. Of
> course, NetBeans is not as spread as Spring, I'm not thinking in the same
> scale. Of course it would be much different than Eclipse, that - as you said
> - is largely funded by IBM. Nevertheless it might happen. It could even
> occur that some company start providing a paying version of NetBeans, such
> as MyEclipse, making a business directly out of it. And of course I'm
> considering not only NetBeans IDE, but NetBeans Platform too, which is used
> by a large number of customers and integrators.
>

No company will provide a paying version of NetBeans. GPL should kill
the market. Dual licensing strikes as a cheap thick IMHO

> --
> Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
> Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
> weblogs.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/blog
> Fabrizio...@tidalwave.it - mobile: +39 348.150.6941
>

--
Marcelo Morales

[Fabrizio Giudici]

Marcelo Morales wrote:
> No company will provide a paying version of NetBeans. GPL should kill
> the market. Dual licensing strikes as a cheap thick IMHO
>
>

NetBeans is GPL + ClassPathException. You can build over the Platform,
or the IDE, adding your own modules, and make people pay for them, and
even not releasing the sources of your stuff. It's just like the
OpenJDK. There's a plenty of commercial, non FLOSS applications
developed on the Platform.

[ADRA]

> NetBeans is GPL + ClassPathException. You can build over the Platform,
> or the IDE, adding your own modules, and make people pay for them, and
> even not releasing the sources of your stuff. It's just like the
> OpenJDK. There's a plenty of commercial, non FLOSS applications
> developed on the Platform.

Anything developed that 'links' with a GPL can arguably be considered
a derivative product of it. So, if you build a plug-in on top of a GPL
program, your plug-in is implicitly GPL as well. That only applies to
making programs FOR NetBeans, not making programs ON NetBeans. The
output of GPL applications are not in themselves restricted by
license. But the thing I don't know is that if the NetBeans
development API's were released as an open specification (to be
implemented by any compliant IDE for instance) then you could write
plug-ins since the plug-in could function without using GPL'd NetBeans
code.

[Jess Holle]

The classpathexception is rather clear on this.  Compiling against NetBeans libraries is not restricted by GPL in this case.  Recompiling/rebuilding existing portions of NetBeans is.

--
Jess Holle

[Fabrizio Giudici]

Jess Holle wrote

>> Anything developed that 'links' with a GPL can arguably be considered
>> a derivative product of it. So, if you build a plug-in on top of a GPL
>> program, your plug-in is implicitly GPL as well. That only applies to
>> making programs FOR NetBeans, not making programs ON NetBeans. The
>> output of GPL applications are not in themselves restricted by
>> license. But the thing I don't know is that if the NetBeans
>> development API's were released as an open specification (to be
>> implemented by any compliant IDE for instance) then you could write
>> plug-ins since the plug-in could function without using GPL'd NetBeans
>> code.
>>
> The classpathexception is rather clear on this. Compiling against
> NetBeans libraries is not restricted by GPL in this case.
> Recompiling/rebuilding existing portions of NetBeans is.
>

Exactly. The fact that Java itself is licensed in the same way, but the
whole world of things built on Java aren't forced to be GPL, should make
it even more clear.