Throughout the years, Sun Microsystems, the godfather of Java, has been committed to supporting the community through its contribution to open source projects and managing the user groups. Now that Oracle is taking over, it is extremely important to define the relationship the Java User Groups are going to have with its new corporate sponsor. For this reason, I decided to attend Oracle Open World this year with a few other JUG Leaders and Champions namely Kay Horstmann, Kevin Nilson, Stephen Chin and Van Riper. Mary Lou Dopart from Oracle, Senior Director of Global Customer Programs, with the coordination of the Aaron Houston, Program Coordinator Java User Groups, and Nichole Scott, Program Manager, from Sun organized a couple of meeting to socialize and discuss the future JUG involvement and integration in the Oracle community. I have to express my appreciation for including us in the conversation.

The Oracle/Sun merger announcement left the impression that the former is more interested in later’s hardware only, its prime completive advantage, and doesn’t care much about the rest of its technologies. This caused a panic and started rumors in the community about the future of Java. One of the questions that is lurking around in the forums was “What is gonna happen to Java?” Honestly I find it quite naïve to think that way for simple reasons. Java is not in the hands of Sun; it is not one of their products anymore, and Oracle does not get to discontinue it and just shut it down. Java, the platform and the language, is established, mature, and bigger than Sun and Oracle. A more valid question would be “What is gonna happen to Glassfish or MySQL?” or “What’s gonna happen to JRockit?” In the key note, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, hit the bull’s eye when he was quoted as saying that “Java speaks for itself”. I have to admit that many people didn’t like his answer and considered it ambiguous and unclear, but a deeper look would reveal that it is, indeed, a well-thought-of statement. Java has truly become in the hand of its community; be it the JCP or the contributors to the OpenJDK project. The decisions about the future of the platform are now made uniformly by literally whoever is interested developing it. Doesn’t that mean that it speaks for itself? This establishes the fact that the concern is Oracle’s future involvement and relationship with the community rather done anything else.

My first impressions about Oracle Open World were quite interesting. I have to admit that they are at times opinionated, but I feel that I am as entitled as anybody else in the community to have strong points of views and voice them. This only encourages healthy debates and steers the conversation to the right direction. From day one, I felt “out of water” as a developer. I came with the expectation of attending technical sessions, and found myself stuck in marketing presentations that highlight the impressive features of Oracle products and solutions. To be fair, a more technical track for software developers was available with a considerable number of sessions; consequently, I decided to attend a couple of hands-on labs. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as I expected either. I have to admit that I learned a lot; mostly about tools, but not much about the technology itself. Van Riper, a Java Champion and the Co-leader of the SV Web JUG, felt the same way in an overview lab about Oracle ADF ( Oracle Application Development Framework). To sum it up, Oracle Open World with all its sessions seemed to me like a giant JavaOne pavilion.

To run away from all the sales and marketing folks disguised in technical costumes, I looked for the oracle user group leaders. To my surprise most of the groups (with the exception of ODTUG) fit the literal sense of the term. They are no more than users of Oracle products. They meet and talk about the features and bugs of the current release, report them, and hope that Oracle fixes them in the next one. It is like a well organized customer feedback community.

On Sunday, the Oracle folks were kind enough to invite us to dinner to meet the people who run the most technical of their user groups, ODTUG (Oracle Development Tools User Group), namely Kathleen McCasland, John Jay King, and Jerry Irland. Based on the conversations I had with the community managers at Oracle and the leaders of their affiliated user group, I noticed major differences between the way they operate and the way thing are in the JUG community. These differences are at the core of the relationship between the user groups and their corporate sponsor, and some of them are so significant that I could see causing tension or problems in the future.

The oracle community is highly structured and organized geographically under umbrella groups. Group affiliation is mandatory and costs a fee most of the time. This shouldn’t be a problem for small JUG like the one I lead (The Chico Java User Group). It actually could be a good thing. On the other hand, I could see it becoming an issue with the big ones. Some of our JUGs are well-established, run million-dollar-budget conferences, and managed to create recognizable brands for themselves. Why would they want to get affiliated, dilute their brand, and share their success with somebody else that was not a part of it in the first place? We can clearly see that in the JUG-USA experience that showed that the big ones are much harder to get inline than the small ones.

The other point is that, in my opinion, Oracle controls, to an extent, what is going on in the user group meetings. This is based on my inferences from a conversation I had with Tina Weiss, the Americas Local User Group Relationship Manager from Oracle. If you ask the members themselves or the leaders, they will tell you that they are independent. My opinion again is that their independence is no more than not being an Oracle employee. May be they feel that way because they enjoy the freedom of publicly discussing bugs and deficiencies of the Oracle products.

This being said, I think both communities are very different and have a lot to learn from each other. The ODTUG have already extended their hand by inviting us to their annual conference on June 27-July 1 in Washington, D.C., the ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010, and that is much appreciated.

On a final note, Oracle needs to realize the benefits it could reap from supporting our communities and understand that the Java community, in particular, is not a burden or a step child it is going to inherit from Sun.

On behalf of the JUG community and myself, I would like to thank all the people from both Sun and Oracle for their tireless efforts to listen to us and respond to our needs especially the names mentioned in this article.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Community. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.