The problem for Glassfish, as the second sentence of this ServerSide article states (see it straight from Oracle’s mouth here, and see also here) is that Oracle view it as being used for “non-mission critical department apps”. Glassfish’s superior technology (or otherwise) just doesn’t come into it. It’s not a factor (as it rarely every is).

Not so long ago Oracle spent a big wad of money acquiring an app server (Weblogic) and then a stack of more money porting all its other products into it and branding the resulting mess platform “Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g”. Now not only do they have their third app server (OC4J/OAS, Weblogic and Glassfish), but the Sun product suite includes products that compete with various Fusion Middleware 11g products (portals, ESBs, and so on). So on one hand you’ve got a “departmental” application server, which you can either licence for free by downloading the open-source version, or buy support for the fancier ‘Enterprise’ version, and on the other, an expensive, full-stack-integrated (all the way to the IDE), fully-branded strategic platform that Oracle just invested a vast amount of money into, and have been pushing like crazy onto customers the past six months. And it is the same sales team that will sell both this licensed “departmental” Glassfish. Therefore if you say the magic words like “need a cluster” or maybe “we might build a portal”, or “we are considering adopting a service-orientated architecture”, lo and behold you’ll find the molto-dinero “Fusion Middleware” based solution installed all over your sorry arse quicker than you can say “can you please explain this per-core with special CPU-architecture-loading-factor licencing schema to me once again and why is it a different price if I upgrade my hardware without adding any additional cores???“.

Let’s dissect those “key points” of Oracle’s strategy announcement:

Key Point	What they meant to say
GlassFish continues as the Java EE reference implementation and as an open source project.	We see it as the way to dominate the direction of Java EE for at least two years, but for Larry’s sake don’t try to use it in production.
Oracle’s strategic application server, Oracle WebLogic Server, together with GlassFish, provide world class Java EE infrastructure.	Oracle’s strategic application server, Oracle WebLogic Server something something something provide world-class something something infrastructure.
GlassFish Enterprise Server and WebLogic Server expected to share core components.	We are the Borg. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
Oracle plans to add GlassFish Enterprise Server all WebLogic offerings.	Hey, look at this cute free “reference implementation” thingy that comes free with Weblogic! You could use that to run your departmental Wiki instead of having to pay us another fortune for more Weblogic licences. Did you say “WIKI”? Did we tell you all about the great wiki-like Enterprise 2.0 features available in the Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g offering? How many test environments did you say you needed licences for?
GlassFish Web Stack maintained for existing customers.	Not available for sale.
GlassFish Message Queue remains as the GlassFish messaging infrastructure.	We’re not expecting to sell any licences of this. Just use Oracle Fusion Middleware’s SOA Suite 11g already. We’re fairly sure that’s got a message queue in it.
Oracle plans to license GlassFish Enterprise Server and Java System Web Server with all WebLogic Server offerings.	See above.
GlassFish also available as standalone offering.	Are you sure you didn’t mean to say “Weblogic”? No? Can you call back next Thursday at 2pm and ask for Fred? We’re reasonably certain he might know something about that Glassthingy.
GlassFish will continue to be supported and maintained for an extended time period for customers current on support.	Well, the lawyers said we had to. We know how to do this. Ask any 10g customer.
GlassFish open source projects thrive	As long as we will let them.

I know I’m a completely cynical bastard about these things, but I will wager within a few months that even if you deliberately ask for Glassfish Enterprise directly that you’ll have to fight off the Weblogic borg absolutely tooth and nail to the last man as they repeatedly try to board your IT department brandishing their integrated-wizard-driven Red Stack. I predict that, basically, after a year of not even trying to sell any Glassfish licences – because if you ask for any of the features that are in the licenced version and not the open-source one, you’ll be pushed to Weblogic (and anyway, at ten times the price they’ll prefer to sell you Weblogic as a default position, after all “Glassfish comes free with Weblogic”) – Oracle will announce, “there’s no sales in it”, then probably ditch the licenced Glassfish version completely, leaving only the open source version. Finally sometime after that they’ll cut the open source funding off and it will have to limp along without hardly any of the resources it formerly had. Maybe they’ll donate it to the ghetto of an Apache incubator project where it can die unnoticed a couple of years after that. It’s a pity because IMHO Glassfish is ten thousand times a better app server than anything Oracle ever produced, or even bought before this.

A few people seem to be sweating about MySQL. It would not be stressing about MySQL too much. It could get spun off, who knows. It’s even possible, as some commenters on Techcrunch say, that Oracle might use the free MySQL offering to hammer Microsoft’s database market from the bottom-up

It’s more touch-and-go in the app-server market (what Oracle likes to call ‘middleware’) which is already suffering a little from Oracle’s transition over to BEA Weblogic from its older products. Sun has excellent products in that area, i.e. Glassfish. I have used all of these products (plus Websphere and JBoss) and Glassfish is easily the nicest (in fact I would say it’s the best app-server I’ve used, apart from plain old Tomcat).

And what will happen to Java? Of course, Oracle wants Java, that’s part of the reason they are buying Sun in the first place (as well as their hardware business). But will IBM play along now it’s most critical competitor owns Java (and IBM has previously bet its software integration farm on the Java stack)? And what of the JCP?

Even more worrying for some, is what will happen in the IDE space. Of course, I’m a confirmed Eclipse man, but it is always a worry when competition is reduced. What will happen to Netbeans? And dare I say it … JDeveloper is fairly horrible compared to Netbeans but will that save either of them? Oracle’s got a lot invested into it’s tooling, which all runs on JDeveloper. As much as I prefer to just write code, that use wizards, Oracle does seem to have at least some customers in that area. Oracle’s development model tends to focus a little too much on magic wizards. From the IDE-JDeveloper-to-the-app-server single click-to-deploy, drag-and-drop to create-the-control, easy-peasy wizardry, which I hate, because I think it gets in the way of craftmanship. It’s the Bunnings Warehouse of software development. Show me the command-line Oracle! you should remember, that Sun is most definitely a company built around the Unix shell prompt. Even with Oracle middleware, it’s definitely possible, I’ve just been working on command-line deployment automation for their older Orion-based app-server, they just don’t like to promote it.

I’m hoping that Sun can reverse-ferret them on that score and teach them about Ant, Maven, /bin/sh and the goodness of installations that are as simple as tar xcf in the spot you want to install it.

Sun Microsystems is getting some love from Wall Street after its sales and earnings topped estimates, as detailed by Bloomberg. Software sales jumped 21 percent year-over-year.

What is fueling the growth? The same thing that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has doggedly said would lift Sun’s fortunes again: open source.

via Open source makes Sun’s quarter shine | The Open Road – CNET News.

If this approach is validated going forward the next year or two, will it change the software industry radically? Quite possibly. Remember this is not a five-man company selling training and consultancy services leveraged off it’s founders’ successful open source software effort, nor even a much larger company set up solely to market and sell services and support contracts based around packaged open source distributions. Sun is a big vendor, which has had to turn its ship of business around almost 180 degrees to get where it’s going now. And maybe, just maybe, it’s on a winning course now.