Fri, 24 May 2002
BEA, J2EE, open source
Rebelutionary says:
"BEA Systems made a fortune selling software to the elite. Now it's stealing a page from Microsoft: evangelizing to the geeky masses."
I think it's great that BEA has realised that they need to get more love from J2EE developers. Every J2EE developer I know who uses BEA hates it - their managers chose it not them (95% of them would rather choose Orion).
That said, I personally think BEA is going the wrong way in evangelising themselves. VB-like, ultra-easy-to-use development environments are one thing but nowhere near the whole picture. (As an aside, Weblogic Workshop doesn't seem close to VB in functionality from what I can see - it's basically only for web services).
If I were running BEA I'd start a division to contribute to Open Source Java projects. That's the sort of thing that gets developers on your side, and also generates useful code for yourselves. Red Hat gets a lot of mileage out of this, Apple is starting to be appreciated by the Open Source community and even Sun is not so hated anymore because of its contributions to Gnome and StarOffice.
So why does BEA seem to hate Open Source? For that matter, are there any J2EE vendors who contribute to Open Source? (Apart from JBoss - they don't count!)
The answer to that final question is complicated, but it has a lot to do with Sun's J2EE licensing which seemingly works against open source projects, notably enhydra and jboss (the latter of which I'm an an enthusiastic supporter, having suffered with BEA at the hands of some ill-headed executives). See this article for more details.
Posted at: 07:54 | permalink
