Will Oracle Surrender NetBeans to Apache? (infoworld.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes InfoWorld: Venerable open source Java IDE NetBeans would move from Oracle's jurisdiction to the Apache Software Foundation under a proposal... endorsed by Java founder James Gosling, a longtime fan of the IDE. Moving NetBeans to a neutral venue like Apache, with its strong governance model, would help the project attract more contributions from various organizations, according to the proposal posted in the Apache wiki.

"Large companies are using NetBeans as an application framework to build internal or commercial applications and are much more likely to contribute to it once it moves to neutral Apache ground," the proposal says. While Oracle will relinquish its control over NetBeans under the proposal, individual contributors from Oracle are expected to continue contributing to the project.
On Facebook, Gosling posted the proposal meant "folks like me can more easily contribute to our favorite IDE. The finest IDE in existence will be getting even better, faster!" InfoWorld reports that when aked if Oracle had neglected NetBeans, Gosling said, "Oracle didn't single out NetBeans for neglect, they neglect everything... I'm thrilled that the NetBeans community will now be able to chart its own course."

Comments

This seems more like a 'hostile takeover'

[guruevi]

For one, this is a proposal to the Apache foundation to take it onto. There is no indication that Oracle has any say in it.

For second "CDDL + GPL v2 with Classpath Exception. Upon entering Apache, the NetBeans license will be migrated to the current Apache License." Not sure how it is possible to 'migrate' GPLv2 code to Apache since the license is incompatible.

Re: This seems more like a 'hostile takeover'

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure all commits to Sun and Oracle required copyright assignments, so it's trivial for Oracle to relicense.

Re:This seems more like a 'hostile takeover'

[slashdot_commentator]

For one, this is a proposal to the Apache foundation to take it onto. There is no indication that Oracle has any say in it.

That is a naive statement.

Oracle owns Sun's intellectual property, which includes Java and Netbeans. Netbeans was under some form of Sun license (GPLish?) before Sun was bought out by Oracle. For the Apache foundation to adopt Netbeans, Netbeans code would have to be forked out of Oracle's repository.

"Hostile takeover" is an invalid term when referred to forking. The question is whether Oracle will challenge the fork. Even if Oracle could lose in court over whether Netbeans "could" fork, it takes money to defend oneself in court. Many of Apache's projects are subsidized by Oracle.

There's almost no way any of Sun's intellectual property can be "taken" from Oracle. They just pissed away hundreds(?) of millions of dollars in court against Google over whether Google could use java(tm) in its android products. Before trial even started, that action forced Google to move from dalvik to the ART VM.

So between Oracle threatening to sue Apache foundation, or even threatening to defund Apache foundation, I believe its really unlikely this forking will proceed without the blessing or indifference of Oracle.

NetBeans 6.8

[s1d3track3D]

NetBeans 6.8 actually had good vi bindings!

Re:NetBeans 6.8

[bn-7bc]

Correct me I'm vrong but isn' vi oftten used synonomusly with vim (i know ir's wrong),? Iirc vi is often symlinked or sliased to start vim so it might alls pe that people write vi out of habbit even when reffering to vim, habbit beeing hatd to break etc

Already approved

[Dan East]

Will Oracle Surrender NetBeans to Apache?

Why is this posed as a question? The articles say Oracle has already turned it over to Apache.

Also, when I see stuff like this:

The finest IDE in existence

My attention immediately shuts off any I have no respect for what that person is saying. Sounds like marketing drivel.

Re:Already approved

[slickwillie]

The finest IDE in existence

My attention immediately shuts off any I have no respect for what that person is saying. Sounds like marketing drivel.

So you have no respect for James Gosling - the creator of Java?

Re:Already approved

[The Evil Atheist]

I certainly don't. It played a large part in cementing a culture where programmers learn to hate having to learn advanced parts of a programming language, and then, due to their own limitations and fear of learning, decide it's better to create yet another program language that has its own set of problems that either their parent language had solved in advanced features, or they reinvent the car crash from another language.

Re:Already approved

[lucm]

It's also pretty good for PHP, js and python. Plus anything that uses yaml like Ansible. I've tried other IDE and always get back to Netbeans.

Re:Already approved

[jandersen]

My attention immediately shuts off any I have no respect for what that person is saying. Sounds like marketing drivel.

They are expressing an opinion, no different from saying "Linux/OSX/Windows is the best thing ever!" - nothing wrong with being excited about your favourite tool, I think, even if others have a different perspective on things.

Here's my experiences with the beast: I have, since the early days of Linux (kernel 0.9 installed wirh a huge pile of floppies) been a terminal+vi+make kind of guy; I never really liked GUI based IDEs and was not too keen on the fullscreen IDEs of the DOS era either. As everybody else with development background, I've had to use IDEs from time to time, but I still prefer to develop C and C++ without. However, since I started on working with Java EE, I suddenly found a use for an IDE, and the one that I converged on was Netbeans - I've tried Eclipse, Kdevelop and JDeveloper, but for me at least, Netbeans has all the things you need when you don't know too much about Java. It automatically suggests which things to import, and believe you me, that is a huge help in Java EE, with the enormous number of standards, annotations and what have you. Perhaps if I had lived with Java development from the beginning, I would have preferred the command line, but ...

Comparing with Eclipse, for example, Netbeans was really easy to get going with, perhaps not surprisingly, because I think Java and Netbeans have grown up together for a long time, whereas Eclipse seems to be more of a universal IDE that started closer to C and C++.(in my superficial view).

Re:Already approved

[DrXym]

Ah right. Java was invented through a fear of learning and developer incompetence. It couldn't possibly be because C and C++ have very obvious shortcomings that some people have a desire to solve while still preserving as much of what they like about it.

And clearly since Java has become the bedrock of enterprise development they clearly got something right.

Re:Already approved

[Anonymous Coward]

>And clearly since Java has become the bedrock of enterprise development they clearly got something right.

So... you're saying that Java is our generation's COBALT?

Re:Already approved

[DrXym]

COBALT? Even assuming you meant COBOL, the answer is no. You're putting words into my mouth.

Re: Already approved

[DrXym]

No dipshit, he/she/you were asking a leading question. i.e putting words into my mouth. And the answer is still no.

Re:Already approved

[DrXym]

Perhaps it's because your question doesn't even make sense and is entirely subjective. Someone into gaming would probably not list any. Someone into their Android phone would probably list most of them.

Re:Already approved

[The Evil Atheist]

Yes, it was invented through a fear of learning and incompetence. It's literally designed to handhold the developer and limit the features that are useful, like multiple inheritance and operator overloading. And it certainly didn't (and I would argue, still doesn't) handle resource cleanup especially well - it's not just about freeing memory safely and reliably, which C++ does better than Java, even before smart pointers, but also other resources like locks, instead of relying on the programmer to remember to release locks etc.

Yes, Java has become a bedrock of enterprise development. But that's because enterprise development is boring and enterprises generally don't like to hire competent people or use state of the art technology. That's why enterprises require LTS versions of stuff and stick with J2EE instead of going to EE 7 or whatnot.

Just a few weeks ago, there was an article posted here about Java 8 features like streams and lambdas. The reaction? Most people hated it. Gee, you don't think fear of learning and incompetence may have something to do with it? I, as a C++ developer, learnt Java 8 streams and lambdas and was writing "enterprise code" in a day with it. It was super simple and made complex things super simple, and yet people were nitpicking the syntax only because they were unfamiliar with it but tried to hide their fear by saying "it sucks" etc. I only need to see the attitudes of programmers themselves regarding new features that you can see a culture of fear of learning and incompetence.

Hoping it's a better success than OpenOffice.org

[Kobun]

Since Netbeans doesn't have an off-shoot project caused by Oracle's famous Neglect(tm), this seems like it ought to be more successful than the OO.org fiasco. Maybe?

Probably not...

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

Were there possibly a paid installed base that Oracle had/could buy, so they could say "we have your quivering, twitching, small-mammal-terrified asshole over a barrel, surrender or die", they might possibly give a marginal fuck; otherwise, no, no, not so much. Surrender or die. It's the Oracle way.

Re:Finest IDE?

[Pikoro]

CVS, Subversion, Mercurial and ClearCase are supported out of the box, with Git requiring an addon but there is WIP to include it with the IDE itself.

Re:Finest IDE?

[TheRealMindChild]

No SourceSafe? Pffffffffffff

Apache is where projects go to die

[Anonymous Coward]

Netbeans is still doing surprisingly well, and is one of the few projects *not* neglected by Oracle. I've yet to see a single project magically take off when migrating to Apache.

Re:Excellent - NetBeans is vastly superior to Ecli

[blackpaw]

Ok, I'll give IntelliJ a go. Does get a lot of good reviews and there's a free edition now I believe.

Re:Fuck Java

[Dutch Gun]

Just FYI, despite what it says in the summary, NetBeans is an IDE with lots of plugins and language support, and works just fine for C++ development as well as Java. I'm using it for the Linux port of my game, written entirely in C++.

surrender...

[hcs_$reboot]

or get rid of?

Re:Finest IDE?

[mark-t]

git support has been OOB in Netbeaans for quite a while now.

Re:Excellent - NetBeans is vastly superior to Ecli

[lucm]

try IntelliJ if you have to, but don't uninstall Netbeans. You will get back to it, especially if you're like me and you're used to work with multiple projects.

I have to use IntelliJ-ish for Android apps and I hate every minute of it.

Re:Finest IDE?

[lucm]

It's probably easier to rewrite an app than port its source code from SourceSafe to Svn or Git.

Re:Fuck Java

[lucm]

Sorry bro, the big boy web and big data all run on Java.

Spoken like a true wannabe.

Facebook -> PHP
Twitter -> ruby
Youtube -> python, C++
google -> c++, java, go, name it
Wikipedia -> PHP
Walmart -> node js
amazon -> perl, java
imdb -> perl
bing -> c#

The "big boy web" is a lot more diverse and random than you think. As for big data, spark is scala and most data scientist work with R and Python. So take that smugness somewhere else, here you just look dumb.

not neglected?

[lucm]

I can't even register a new account on netbeans website to report bugs. Even the "contact the webmaster" link is broken.

Re:Excellent - NetBeans is vastly superior to Ecli

[Cyberax]

IntelliJ works fine with multiple projects open at the same time.

Re:Fuck Java

[NotAPK]

No Slashdot?

Still Perl isn't it?

Long-time Netbeans user here

[vikingpower]

I've used Forte for Java, and then Netbeans. On-premise contracts with various customer sometimes require Eclipse, using which feels like a herd of rodents nibbling at my brain. To me (caveat: this is an opinion based upon 17+ years of experience, not a fact) Netbeans is, indeed, superior to any other IDE in existence, except for emacs if used properly.

What I admire in Netbeans is the ergonomic look-and-feel. It always seems as if the tool or feature you're looking for is right at hand, or at the most 2 mouse actions away. I LOVE the maven integration, and having Mercurial / git / Subversion out of the box. And no, installing plugins does not make the whole thing bloated and impossible to move around, as with Eclipse.

So yes, Netbeans moving to Apache: great ! Let's take it away from Oracle's NeGlect (TM) attic.

Re:Long-time Netbeans user here

[iampiti]

I don't know if it's just me but I find Eclipse very cumbersome and unintuitive compared to Netbeans. In Netbeans things seem to be in logical places in Eclipse they're usually where I wouldn't normally look for them.

Re:Excellent - NetBeans is vastly superior to Ecli

[ausekilis]

I too hate that Eclipse seems to be the de-facto standard. For me, if it doesn't overrun its memory limits (which I have set to 1G), it freezes, crashes, refuses to save files, and otherwise can be best described as acting like a child.
Me: Save the file
Eclipse: I don't wanna
Me: Save the bloody file
Eclipse: No, and now I'm not going to talk to you
Me: Go to timeout (pkill -9 java)
...wait 3 min...
Me: Ready to save the file?
Eclipse: Save the file? Why didn't you say so earlier? I love saving files!
(face on keyboard)

Will Oracle surrender to Apache?

[hey!]

Or will they circle the wagons?

Re:Hoping it's a better success than OpenOffice.or

[iampiti]

I certainly hope so since I've been using Netbeans for many years and I really like it. However, it looks to me that when Oracle donates some project to someone else they just want to stop investing in it, and something the size of Netbeans I don't think will get very far without a corporate sponsor

Re:Fuck Java

[lucm]

Too bad upgrading hasn't made them any more profitable

Re: Fuck Java

[lucm]

I find it amusing when java apologists talk about various other programming languages running on a jvm, as if it was anything else than a clear sign that java isn't all that optimal as a programming language. Why do you think exactly scala exists? (hint: read the wikipedia entry about scala).

It's like when people run Linux on Azure. It's not that much of an endorsement of Microsoft.