Our java.net spotlight this week is the announcement by Oracle's Ted Farrell about the future of Kenai.com and its infrastructure. Prior to Ted's announcement, all that was known publicly was that Kenai was going to be closed down. It turns out that, while that's true with respect to the domain name, it's not true that the Kenai infrastructure and project contents will be eliminated.
Here's Ted's complete message:
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
Overall, the news was greeted enthusiastically by the community. For example, on the Kenai blog, prior to the announcement, the comments posted by people universally expressed displeasure and disappointment, because the earliest news from Oracle about Kenai talked of a simple close-down of the site. After Ted's announcement, there were comments like "Great, great, great! :-)" (by Fabrizio Giudici, who has multiple projects on Kenai) and "YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!" (by Chuk).
However, the "poor job of communicating" that Ted Farrell acknowledges did have an impact. While most people are pleased that the Kenai infrastructure will remain intact, just under a different domain name, a few people saw the apparent switch from "Kenai will close in 60 days" to "I suggest that you stay put on kenai.com and let us work through the details" more than unnerving, and plan to move away from Kenai regardless of the opportunity to stay.
The nine months of delay between the announcement of Oracle's acquisition of Sun and its completion provided Oracle with a lot of time for studying what they were acquiring in Sun. Still, due to the legalities associated with acquisitions, it was impossible to have the entire post-acquisition integration plan perfectly set in every detail. Despite its final market capitalization, Sun was a very big company. Its integration into Oracle will take some time, and will include some missteps.
A "poor job of communication" indeed happened with respect to Kenai. But the problem was resolved within 10 days of the completion of the acquisition. That's a pretty fast reaction time, in my view.
Some people have wondered why Kenai wasn't made a part of java.net right from the start. I don't know the answer to that question. Still, I think it's excellent that now Kenai and java.net will be integrated in some manner. I look forward to hearing the details on what the structure of this integration will ultimately be.
It's been just over a week since Oracle held its post-acquisition stategy webcast and we've already seen some fast reactions and comments from Oracle on several topics : • Projects hosted in Kenai will preserve their infrastructure and be moved to java.net (the best of both worlds if you ask me). See Ted Farrell's post for the details...
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Our current Spotlight is the Oracle announcement about Kenai.com: "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..."
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