Roundtable Transcript, Part 1 (Continued)

The Role of Open Source Technologies
[45:58] Renaud: I'll make the argument that open source is a great way to do that because open source gives, first of all, the option of getting everybody to contribute to the software without any sort of strange IP orders or screwy things that go along with that, first. And second of all, putting stuff in open source gives the customer a great measure of investment protection without standards. Mainly, if a customer wants to do some early adoption in an emerging technology, and they want to get their feet wet and they want to be able to tell us collectively if the technology is good, they can do so without locking themselves into a proprietary framework because the thing is open source.

[46:44] Jackson: Open source is one avenue, but what if no avenues exist and Oracle goes off and builds ADF because their customers want to be more productive? There's not an open source solution to everything, I agree, but that's a good model. But then somebody has to go fund the open source initiative, which is not trivial, particularly, for a company like mine. So I mean how do you…

[47:07] Milinkovich: Thank you for saying what I wanted to say.

[Laughter]

[47:12] Farrell: I fundamentally agree with Benjamin's point about trying it; I don't think that in practice that works in the environment we're in today. You look at things that are open source. You know examples we have today. I mean SWT for Eclipse is a good one right I mean that has no plan of coming back in because it deviated so much. I mean look at the really popular one in Apache Struts.

[47:32] Milinkovich: Let me ask you not to speak for Eclipse, thanks.

[47:34] Phipps: I'll ask you the question in a minute here.

[47:37] Farrell: I don't think I was speaking for Eclipse, Mike. Struts is another good example. A lot of people are committed to Struts, a very popular framework. You know JavaServer Faces came along, and now people are who have committed to this are thinking that it was the de facto standard and they're now struggling getting back into the standard, so I think trying things out, every Struts application if they want to be compliant, is going to have to either conflict with or align with JavaServer Faces.

[48:10] Stover: So for Eclipse let me ask you a question, since it was brought up. Do you think that the fact that something like Struts might be commoditized by a Java standard is a deterrent to open source initiatives?

[48:24] Elloy: It depends on where customers have taken it and now run their business.

[48:28] Farrell: That's really the [issue]. How long it stays out there in any form, whether it's the vendor's gaining popularity or whether it's an open source forum, it's the length, right. Nothing's going to get the technology to mature better than causing all of us who are making a living off of it to try to implement it for our customers, right, we all have the diversity of experience. A lot of projects don't get picked up by a lot of big community and open source, and the ones that do a lot of the time aren't building the type of enterprise application that the rest of us are.

[48:57] Renaud: I have a direct counter example to what you are talking about, which is that…first of all, if you look at the newer, you know, JavaServer Faces have been heavily influenced by Struts, I mean, heavily. If you look at the convergence of the technologies, it's very clear looking at the specs. Look at the Hibernate framework, for example, which is widely acknowledged as being the thing that's going to be one of the foundations of EJB 3.0. It's a perfect example of open source innovating wide acceptance of that package and making it back into the standard. It's intuitively a good idea, and I think there are plenty of examples showing that it does work.