RE: Orion and J2EE licensing
Title: RE: Orion and J2EE licensing Hi. Do you know the source of that report? Would be extremely interesting to read. WR -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: den 19 december 2000 05:46 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion and J2EE licensing Interesting perspective Scott. At first it seemed you were bashing Orion for their quotes. While I agree..how can Orion claim to be J2EE (much less the only one available) while not licensing J2EE from Sun nor running the suite of tests that supposedly iPlanet and BEA have run, I would also tend to believe after working with BEA, trying out iPlanet, and what not that there is some major biased from Sun towards the big money making products over smaller open-source or almost free products such as Orion, jBoss, etc. Its amazing to me how many people have displayed WebLogic's inability to properly support J2EE, yet somehow BEA claims its the first J2EE licensed app server. Meanwhile, iPlanet is claimed to be the first J2EE certified app server (which raises the question..how can there be two first J2EE certified app servers?). And for God's sake..if Sun makes iPlanet, why in the world ISNT it the first FULLY J2EE supported app server?!! My CTO read a report on some app servers and Orion didn't do too well, accept in the department of ease of use, price, performance and stability. Hmm..isn't this what we want? :) iPlanet wasn't bad, WebLogic 5.1 had some problems and was difficult to work with, SilverStream was a bit arcane in its use of a database for persistence storage of HttpSession (as well as deploying an app from a database instead of a file), and WebSphere is way behind the times..not even close to fully support J2EE. Thus far, I look at the 4 big guys and laugh. While Orion leaves a lot to be desired, it supports J2EE very well (as far as I am able to tell..still got a bit of EJB stuff to learn before I can know in that area). Its very simple to install and get running (for the most part). It lacks documentation, has terrible customer support (per telephone for the most part), and is otherwise not exactly a product that a company can depend on because of the small company, no idea what is going on with them or what is happening in the near future, and no market share (mostly meaning the name Orion doesn't stand out to many people). My personal take on what your saying is that if Sun tries to apply licensing at the ridiculous price they are charging for it to small companies, there will be no small companies around to offer a product. Also, how can they charge a FREE product, or an open-source product? I am hoping Sun doesn't pull that crap, because if they do, we may see app servers go the way of .com companies..pretty soon only a few, if not one, will be left, leaving little choice for ASPs and companies alike to use. I sure would hate to be stuck with only one or two choices all because Sun, one of the few companies I would ever expect to do something like this, actually does it. That to me is a Microsoft move, one of which I personally would find a bad PR move (not that Sun cares about my personal opinion or anything), especially when J2EE is still at the early stages. If enough developers and technical people balk at the limited choices because Sun pushed licensing on all app server vendors, I hope they have some other products coming up to replace J2EE, because I can't imagine it continuing it success if only a few companies are left to implement it and nobody wants to use it. But who am I? ;) -Original Message- From: Scott Stirling [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 7:34 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion and J2EE licensing I'm trying to grasp some J2EE licensing concepts. I'm trying to decide if Sun is fleecing some companies over J2EE branding fees while leaving others alone for arbitrary or capricious reasons. I just posted a long message about it to the jbosslicense group at http://www.egroups.com/group/jbosslicense. There are some very disturbing issues that are not only philosophically interesting, but important to Java developers, organizations and companies who are basing business goals and decisions on server-side Java software. If any of the folks at Orion can comment, that would be fascinating, since Orion is one of the few J2EE servers I know of that's closed-source, but not (as far as I know) branded J2EE. However, I believe the open source J2EE servers out there are as much at risk of being sued or halted by Sun as Orion, based on my understanding of J2EE licensing and branding thus far. If anyone can point to me to some resources on this, please do. I notices these relevant comments from the Orion FAQ: Q: What sets Orion apart from
SV: Orion and J2EE licensing
Title: RE: Orion and J2EE licensing They dont claim to be the first two certed servers, but one is the first who licensed J2EE and one is the first who went through the test suite (hence the CERT) :) iPlanet is old Netscape web/app server btw..Sun is just cooperating with them in a partnership. Sun only has one application server who they made and that is the reference implementation :) so they where first :) But still you make good argumentation, there is lots to be frustrated about out there. And the reason we dont use BEA, iPlanet or websphere for that sake is because of the different reports about incompatability comming from the J2EE community. We use Orion and Sybase EAServer 3.6.1 wich are excelent (except from Orions applet jndi bug which is horrible and critical for our environment, thats the only reason why we went to Sybase J2EE certed server, yepp one of the four that has the CERT (not the licence, licence dont mean anything, its the cert that means anything)) If orion wants to get through the J2EE test suite they have a lot to do, amongst other things corba has to be supported for the ejb2.0 spec and so on. But hey its a good alternative anyways if you only drive web applications, and if you have dicipline enough to keep within the spec when making your applications even if you meet bugs and have to do workarounds. In the long run you will probably get a better server platform for all but the standard have to get some time to stabilize (this is a quite new technology, so things have to stabilize a bit before vendors have time to cert their servers and get up to date). Just think about it, EJB1.1 spec isnt to old, and now EJB2.0 is coming fast (with huge mods), what should a vendor do, every one wants to be the first with ejb2.0 support and get the publicity for that + be a contender in the race, and certing for them means to stop at their development branch and do "bugfixing and mods" to the existing code to get the test suite to run flawlessly. Its not a difficult choice when customers are screaming for new versions :) I do think we get atleast another year with "chewing in" and accepting the shortcomings of some servers out there. When it comes to the pricing parts ofcourse there are differences. But hey you choose after what your boss desside :), and if you are on a project that dont need good support and documentation, you can choose Orion, but if you are working on a high scale project that will need to be scalable and have a support system that responds fast + engeneers that can come on site to fix up in your problems, you choose someone else. If you need to use applets or webstart applications you choose someone who have got a client library :) since its not cool downloading an applet containing lots of useless jars and takes forever to run when you only reallyneed a thin client driver. ยจ PS. One of the four largest application server vendors is Sybase (see http://my.sybase.com/detail?id=1009721)... Still i allso think prices on some application servers are a bit stiff yes, but look what they have support for (some of them), look at the organization around the product, and look on the documentation. I was impressed printing out the programmers manual of EAS driving 730 A4 pages of usefull information. But if you dont need this, and youhave the possibility in your project to solve everything yourself Orion has no competition, its just a big heap of server for the price :).. (There is never one side to any case) I would presume i got a flamebait here. But hey what are lists for! :) But still the best advice is to not get all fired up now before x-mas :) gota have a good holiday right! Merry x-mas everyone.. (guess its my last post to the list before new years eve hehe) Klaus Myrseth -Opprinnelig melding-Fra: Magnus Rydin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]Sendt: 19. desember 2000 09:38Til: Orion-InterestEmne: RE: Orion and J2EE licensing Hi. Do you know the source of that report? Would be extremely interesting to read. WR -Original Message- From: Duffey, Kevin [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: den 19 december 2000 05:46 To: Orion-Interest Subject: RE: Orion and J2EE licensing Interesting perspective Scott. At first it seemed you were bashing Orion for their quotes. While I agree..how can Orion claim to be J2EE (much less the only one available) while not licensing J2EE from Sun nor running the suite of tests that "supposedly" iPlanet and BEA have run, I would also tend to believe after working with BEA, trying out iPlanet, and what not that there is some major biased from Sun towards the big money making products over smaller open-source or "almost free" products such as Orion, jBoss, etc. Its amazing to me how many people have displayed WebLogic's inability to properly support J2EE,
RE: Orion and J2EE licensing
Interesting perspective Scott. At first it seemed you were bashing Orion for their quotes. While I agree..how can Orion claim to be J2EE (much less the only one available) while not licensing J2EE from Sun nor running the suite of tests that "supposedly" iPlanet and BEA have run, I would also tend to believe after working with BEA, trying out iPlanet, and what not that there is some major biased from Sun towards the big money making products over smaller open-source or "almost free" products such as Orion, jBoss, etc. Its amazing to me how many people have displayed WebLogic's inability to properly support J2EE, yet somehow BEA claims its the first J2EE licensed app server. Meanwhile, iPlanet is claimed to be the first J2EE certified app server (which raises the question..how can there be two first J2EE certified app servers?). And for God's sake..if Sun makes iPlanet, why in the world ISNT it the first FULLY J2EE supported app server?!! My CTO read a report on some app servers and Orion didn't do too well, accept in the department of ease of use, price, performance and stability. Hmm..isn't this what we want? :) iPlanet wasn't bad, WebLogic 5.1 had some problems and was difficult to work with, SilverStream was a bit arcane in its use of a database for persistence storage of HttpSession (as well as deploying an app from a database instead of a file), and WebSphere is way behind the times..not even close to fully support J2EE. Thus far, I look at the 4 big guys and laugh. While Orion leaves a lot to be desired, it supports J2EE very well (as far as I am able to tell..still got a bit of EJB stuff to learn before I can know in that area). Its very simple to install and get running (for the most part). It lacks documentation, has terrible "customer" support (per telephone for the most part), and is otherwise not exactly a product that a company can depend on because of the small company, no idea what is going on with them or what is happening in the near future, and no market share (mostly meaning the name Orion doesn't stand out to many people). My personal take on what your saying is that if Sun tries to apply licensing at the ridiculous price they are charging for it to small companies, there will be no small companies around to offer a product. Also, how can they charge a FREE product, or an open-source product? I am hoping Sun doesn't pull that crap, because if they do, we may see app servers go the way of .com companies..pretty soon only a few, if not one, will be left, leaving little choice for ASPs and companies alike to use. I sure would hate to be stuck with only one or two choices all because Sun, one of the few companies I would ever expect to do something like this, actually does it. That to me is a Microsoft move, one of which I personally would find a bad PR move (not that Sun cares about my personal opinion or anything), especially when J2EE is still at the early stages. If enough developers and technical people balk at the limited choices because Sun pushed licensing on all app server vendors, I hope they have some other products coming up to replace J2EE, because I can't imagine it continuing it success if only a few companies are left to implement it and nobody wants to use it. But who am I? ;) -Original Message- From: Scott Stirling [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 7:34 PM To: Orion-Interest Subject: Orion and J2EE licensing I'm trying to grasp some J2EE licensing concepts. I'm trying to decide if Sun is fleecing some companies over J2EE branding fees while leaving others alone for arbitrary or capricious reasons. I just posted a long message about it to the jbosslicense group at http://www.egroups.com/group/jbosslicense. There are some very disturbing issues that are not only philosophically interesting, but important to Java developers, organizations and companies who are basing business goals and decisions on server-side Java software. If any of the folks at Orion can comment, that would be fascinating, since Orion is one of the few J2EE servers I know of that's closed-source, but not (as far as I know) branded J2EE. However, I believe the open source J2EE servers out there are as much at risk of being sued or halted by Sun as Orion, based on my understanding of J2EE licensing and branding thus far. If anyone can point to me to some resources on this, please do. I notices these relevant comments from the Orion FAQ: "Q: What sets Orion apart from other application servers? A: Many things make Orion a leader among application servers. A few of these things are: Superb performance. Orion is easily the fastest J2EE-based Application Server Orion is the only commercially available application server with full J2EE support Unique development features like auto-deploy and full hot-swap. Very affordable pricing" Now, since Orion has not (so
Orion and J2EE licensing
I'm trying to grasp some J2EE licensing concepts. I'm trying to decide if Sun is fleecing some companies over J2EE branding fees while leaving others alone for arbitrary or capricious reasons. I just posted a long message about it to the jbosslicense group at http://www.egroups.com/group/jbosslicense. There are some very disturbing issues that are not only philosophically interesting, but important to Java developers, organizations and companies who are basing business goals and decisions on server-side Java software. If any of the folks at Orion can comment, that would be fascinating, since Orion is one of the few J2EE servers I know of that's closed-source, but not (as far as I know) branded J2EE. However, I believe the open source J2EE servers out there are as much at risk of being sued or halted by Sun as Orion, based on my understanding of J2EE licensing and branding thus far. If anyone can point to me to some resources on this, please do. I notices these relevant comments from the Orion FAQ: "Q: What sets Orion apart from other application servers? A: Many things make Orion a leader among application servers. A few of these things are: Superb performance. Orion is easily the fastest J2EE-based Application Server Orion is the only commercially available application server with full J2EE support Unique development features like auto-deploy and full hot-swap. Very affordable pricing" Now, since Orion has not (so far as I am aware) licensed J2EE from Sun, there's no way they have the Sun compatibility test suite (CTS) for J2EE, so they obviously haven't even tried to pass the tests. Since BEA, IONA and iPlanet have passed the CTS, I hardly think Orion is "the only commercially available application server with full J2EE support." And I would think that sort of claim is precisely what would put Orion at the risk of being dogged by Sun attorneys. Here's another interesting quote: "Q: Any plans to offer your source under a Linux-style license? A: No, there are currently no such plans. In fact, if we did, Sun might sue us since they see any implementation of the J2EE specification as their intellectual property that we can not show to anyone." This makes no sense. The source code for the RI of J2EE can be downloaded by anyone who agrees to the Sun Community Source License. jBoss implements a large part of the J2EE specs, and that's LGPLed. While I agree with the Orion FAQ that there are certainly issues of intellectual property with J2EE software, I don't agree with that logic at all. I'll say the same thing I said about jBoss on the other list (substituting "Orion" for "jBoss" everywhere): "If Orion is allowed to implement many of the foundational J2EE specs (JNDI, JTA, EJB, etc.), without paying a commercial license fee for the specs and Sun APIs like BEA, IBM, IONA and others have done, doesn't that tear a huge hole in the integrity and legality of Sun's J2EE branding and licensing? It makes it appear as though Sun is unfairly targeting large businesses who use their APIs and specs, while leaving open source/small businesses alone. That would be capricious, and I think illegal of Sun. This may not be an issue now, because Orion is just gaining ground in the business world. But in 6-9 months, if Orion gains momentum, I would expect the J2EE licensees to start complaining about loss of market share to a product that's never commercially licensed the APIs, never paid the contractual fees, and never passed the compatibility tests. They would pressure Sun to enforce the J2EE and Sun Community Source License rules on Orion as a commercial product. This could also apply to JONAS, OpenEJB, Enhydra, jBoss etc." I know this stirs up the pot, so to speak, and I know some people couldn't care less. But for my career and my interests in server-side Java and things like open source and open standards, I think these issues are very important. I'm trying to get some feedback from like-minded folks or from official representatives of commercial concerns on how these issues touch them, whether they feel they've been resolved, how they understand/cope with them, or even if their attitude is "we'll cross that bridge when Sun's lawyers bring us to it." Best regards, Scott Stirling West Newton, MA
