"Hey Larry"

As you probably know, Oracle has begun its consolidation of the assets it has obtained from its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Yesterday I received an email notifying me that Oracle has pulled the plug on Kenai.com. You can interpret this as you see fit but in my opinion this is a mistake for a number of reasons, not least of which is the message it sends to developers.

So "Hey Larry" will be my channel for commenting on both the good and the not so good steps that Oracle takes in regard to those Sun assets which we developers have come to rely on. To start things off, here's the first "Hey Larry" entry...

02/03/2010

Hey Larry,
I just heard that you are shutting down Kenai.com. Why? You don't think it is an asset for developers to have a Kenai.com service as a resource? You don't value the good will a resource like Kenai.com generates with your developer community? What else are you going to "shutdown"? Netbeans, MySql, Java, OpenOffice.org, etc.? I was enthusiastic about the Oracle/Sun deal but I feared something like this would result. I guess my fears were justified. Hey Larry ... don't be a jerk with your developer community. It might come back to haunt ya!

02/04/2010

Hey Larry,
I like what I heard in this web cast, especially what you are promising for Netbeans and Netbeans.org. Keeping the Netbeans devevelopment team intact is smart as is sharing between the 3 IDE platform groups

02/07/2010

Hey Larry,

I just read your clarification regarding your plans for Kenai.com (see below) which I received yesterday. This will, I am sure, be very well received by your developer community. I can hear their collective sigh of relief. It doesn't matter why the 180 on Kenai.com but my naturally curious nature tells me that the negative reaction to your original announcement played 'something' of a role. That you listened and reevaluated and came to what can only be called a very smart decision demonstrates a resolve to embrace your developer community. Good move!

Gentlepeople,

In an effort to get information out to the Kenai community quickly, while trying to manage the integration of our two companies, I think we did a poor job at communicating our plans for Kenai.com to you. I would like to remedy that now.

Our strategy is simple. We don't believe it makes sense to continue investing in multiple hosted development sites that are basically doing the same thing. Our plan is to shut down kenai.com and focus our efforts on java.net as the hosted development community.

We are in the process of migrating java.net to the kenai technology. This means that any project currently hosted on kenai.com will be able to continue as you are on java.net. We are still working out the technical details, but the goal is to make this migration as seamless as possible for the current kenai.com projects.

So in the meantime I suggest that you stay put on kenai.com and let us work through the details and get back to you later this month.

Thanks for your feedback and patience.

-Ted Farrell
Oracle Corporation

02/15/2010
Hey Larry,
Congratulations on winning back America's Cup. Outstanding!