Jobs announced a price drop on the iPhones last week from $599 to $399, upsetting the early adopters who all ran out to buy one on day 1. Smart move to drop the price, but maybe not too smart this closely after they were launched? The price is at least now more realistic. Apple are also reportedly offering $100 back to anyone who paid the full price prior to the price drop.
IBM to add resources to OpenOffice project
IBM have announced that they will be adding resources to help with the OpenOffice project, the open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite.
Glassfish V2 – to include performance improvements?
I tried running a couple of simple webapps that I currently run on JBoss 4.x on Glassfish V1 (including this website and blog), and was surprised to find out that my apps ran painfully slow. This was just an observation, I don’t have any exact timings, but where my webapps on JBoss 4 the pages load within the snap of your fingers, on Glassfish V1 it seems that pages were taking a couple of seconds to come back, and it didn’t improve even after successive page hits.
I heard on the JavaPosse’s interview with the Glassfish developer guys that the Final Release Candidate for V2 has a number of performance improvements (since V1 was just a developer release), so I’m interested to give it another try sometime soon.
I’ve used JBoss for a number of years to run my sites, but from being used to using Weblogic and Websphere during my ‘day job’, I’m used to having a rich administration front end, which I think is the one area where JBoss lacks. Glassfish on the otherhand has an admin console to compare with the big guys, and this is particularly attractive to me. I’ll post an update when I’ve tried it out again.
Fleury finished with the Software business?
Marc Fleury, founder and once CEO of JBoss before he sold the company to RedHat, recently did an interview with news.com. Sounds like he’s happy being away from the business of Open Source, the business model that JBoss itself created by offering paid Professional Services for Open Source products, and the software industry as a whole.
I’m sure Fleury will be missed – he completely turned the Software industry on it’s head and showed the big Corporations that Open Source is a viable commercial option, and that good quality software can be produced for free by a community of developers. IBM has it’s Geronimo open source Java EE server offering, Oracle donated the source for their ORM tool TopLink as Open Source, and Sun has made it their business recently to Open Source practically everything they have – the Java platform, Netbeans (it’s Java IDE which had previously been feeding into it’s commercial IDE offerings like Studio Creator, but that flow of knowledge seems to have reversed recently and features from Creator are finding their way into Netbeans), Glassfish App Server, Open Solaris, the list goes on.
In the interview, Fleury said he would not be doing a ‘JBoss 2’ – if he does start a new business it will be in biotech, not Software. Although JBoss continues in name under it’s new owners, RedHat, it will definitely be remembered from the turning point in open source awareness that it created within the industry.