You know between Java, Hudson and moves like this it feels like we're ripe for an Onion-style article about Oracle execs running out of ideas for pissing off the OSS community and so doing a road-trip around the country to individually insult every OSS developer and user in the most graphic and personal way they can think of.
Oracle has a profitable business model. It works for them. They have some open source projects that they no longer care to support. In the open source model, someone else is free to carry the torch. It should only require a few people to adopt the Ruby plugin. There are already lots of Netbeans plugins so the learning curve:
A fair point for Rails-on-Netbeans. Not quite so much for Hudson, where Oracle wants not just to stay involved, but to stay in control --- and the amount of control they want is what's pissing off everyone else (including the primary author of the software, Kohsuke Kawaguchi).
So it's actually better for the Ruby/Rails plugin to be dropped by Oracle. Then the community doesn't have to fork to save it from Oracle's controlling hands.
Anyone who cares about open source doesn't buys oracle. So now it doesn't matter. 5 years from now, when "open source believer" rise to a management position, and all the infrastructure and people is oracle, the is really very little decision power.
The OSS community for Hudson (actually, CloudBees) is forking Hudson against Oracle's will.
RoR support is just dropped due to various constraints and the community is actually encouraged to intervene:
>However, we strongly encourage our community of NetBeans Ruby users and developers to volunteer to take on development of Ruby on Rails support for the NetBeans IDE.
I'm curious if people will pick up RoR support or just continue complaining about Oracle because they don't make things for free.
I've used it for (J)Ruby GUI development. The built-in WYSYWYG editor is pretty sweet, so Netbeans works very well as as an all-in-one dev tool for building JRuby + Swing + Monkeybars apps.
I've never used it for any Rails development, and found the coupling of the Ruby packages with Rails gems, and the presumption in the add-ons that any Ruby project was a Rails project, a bit dopey. There seems to be no way to install the Ruby stuff without the Rail stuff, though.
I much prefer using vim for development, and while there's a vim plugin for Netbeans I typically did serious editing in an external vim instance while using Netbeans for GUI stuff, or for some refactoring, which it does quite well.
For people who like IDEs, Netbeans is a really good Ruby/JRuby editor.
I've also used for several sinatra apps. Their refactoring, autocomplete, debugging and unit test/rpec is superb. Not to mention it supports Mercurial and is free, what Intellij's Ruby IDE doesn't (the core is open and free, and supports mercurial, but their ruby thing is not a plugin, and it is not compatible with the good stuff). Yeah, its a loss, but they've been neglecting it for a while, so it is sad.
Just a quick "me too" here. It's a great combination for knocking together a quick GUI around whatever random hack the business needs today. I don't know of a Swing editor that's as good.
"Second: Although our Ruby support has historically been well received, based on existing low usage trends we are unable to justify the continued allocation of resources to support the feature."
I would say, not a whole lot according to their trend analysis.
I don't agree with some of the things Oracle has done as of late, but that seems quite reasonable to me. If usage levels are quite low, then it is a waste of time to keep devoting resources to it.
Anecdotally, I don't know of a single RoR developer who uses Netbeans. Vim, Textmate and Emacs seem to be the editors of choice.
I've been using NetBeans on Linux as my main Rails IDE for the last few years. I kinda like netbeans, but I've been using it since about v4 so I'm somewhat accustomed to it.
Features I make use of: project navigation, file navigation, syntax highlighting, jump to a declaration, re-indent and very occasional code-complete (mostly for css)
Features I don't use: everything else. I always have a terminal window open with about 5/6 tabs from which i do all my generations, migrations, console, server etc. I use RVM and NetBeans doesn't seem to play nicely with that
I do JRuby/Rails development. Typically I'm in emacs (Aquamacs, actually), but I've used NetBeans occasionally when I wanted to use the debugger... beats the hell out of tracing w/ Rails.logger.
I don't understand why this move should piss off anybody in the OSS community. Oracle is a private company and as such has only obligations to its shareholders. They may or may not support and/or promote OSS projects as they see fit, same as every one of us. It's their free choice.
Look at what kind of headway corporations like google have made in the mind of consumers when they go above and beyond the shareholder mantra. Oracle might make short term gains on their terms but they have started to poison a whole new generation of developers.
Webpages are not a complement to Oracle's business model, thus what makes sense for Oracle and Google to open source are vastly different. If you look at what Google open sources, it's all compliments to their business model. Google doesn't open source technology that it makes money from.
As to going above and beyond in regards to open source, you'd have to look at where NetBeans came from Sun. Look where all that open source got them.
Oracle is not a person to make such a decision; it is its shareholders who should decide how they want to spend their money. I wouldn't want to have a tax (as an Oracle investor or a private citizen) to support OSS. I may want to contribute my money and/or code as a donation, but that will be my own choice.
The reason is that Oracle inherited the stewardship of so many important projects when they bought Sun. After the purchase they have not said 'OK guys, new management; we don't do the open source thing; so long.' Rather they put the knife into various projects in different ways, seemingly at random. This behaviour taken in sum has an unsettling effect on the outlook of any project that Oracle is still involved with. How long will Netbeans itself survive? It's anybody's guess.
It's not just one case of support being withdrawn. It's Russian roulette.
That they are free to make this choice doesn't mean the community needs to roll over in accepting it. A response to this news that doesn't indicate displeasure would lack integrity.
I'll try to read that over the weekend, but I'll just note that it's not difficult, especially for someone of Friedman's stature and intelligence, to construct an internally consistent exposition of a particular worldview. That is to say, I hope he accounts for falsifiability. ;)
