Cameron, I think you’re severely mischaracterizing the situation - NB hasn’t lost its way, but it has lost corporate sponsorship.
In the old days, Sun, flush with cash and a desire to promote Java, bought the little startup from Europe and provided the financial resources to make it flourish. I think the turning point for NB came when Oracle bought Sun. I think Java in general and NB in particular weren’t important to the Database giant. Java itself didn’t suffer much as it had become one of the top languages of the world and millions of developers and thousands of organizations depended on it and were, thus, willing to support its continued growth. But NB, even in the days of Sun, had to compete with other IDEs - initially Symantec’s Visual Cafe and later IntelliJ and Eclipse. The latter, “free” like NB, became the 800lb gorilla in the room. Always supported by IBM and then also other companies. But NB managed to hold its own until Oracle decided to no longer support it at the level it needed. IMO, the spin-off to Apache was just Oracle trying to shed itself of this “cost center” and try to have the folks that use NB become more responsible for its future. I applaud the devs who came from Sun & Oracle to continue to diligently direct NB’s development and future. But it’s up to to its users to make this work. If you need a feature, don’t simply complain about it not being there - help develop it! Otherwise you’re really just a whining freeloader. If you helped work to make NB better, goodbye. Otherwise, goodbye and good riddance. Tom Wolf (another freeloader - but one who’s not whining.) > On Sep 28, 2019, at 11:05 AM, Alan Cameron > <alan.camer...@virginmedia.com.invalid> wrote: > > > Hi All, > > Walter Oney’s email is the last straw for me. > > I had been a user of NetBeans 8.2 , using it for self-training in C, C++ and > PHP when this Apache incubation thing started and NetBeans 8.2 was dropped > from any sort of support. I have been watching the emails to this list with > increasing worries that it would never get around to PHP let alone C, C++. > > The organisation has lost its way and is not helping itself by diverging from > some sort of common ground. > > A radical rethink is long overdue and I wonder how commercial shops can stand > the ever mounting problems with this and that. I am surprised there are any > commercial users left using NetBeans. > > I will be cancelling my subscription to this and other list tarred with the > Apache name. > > Goodbye. > > From Alan Cameron > Please reply to alan.camer...@virginmedia.com >