On 13/10/17 09:49, Bertrand Delacretaz wrote:
Hi,
On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 1:21 AM, Antonio Vieiro <[email protected]> wrote:
...Should NetBeans support Apache Spark? Tomcat? The Go programming
language? R? Whatever? Just find a big pool of developers and ask them
what to do next, what they need, what they want...
However I think NetBeans is more an end-user tool. I use it myself but
don't really care how it's built, and learning that would not help me
progress much in my careeer where I'm doing other things - with
similar technologies but other things.
It's important to know that the NetBeans user base is. Maybe we should
start by defining that. I distinguish these two sets:
- One part of the NetBeans user base is formed by (or was formed by) big
companies and organizations such as NATO, The US Navy, the European
Union, Boeing, NASA, ESA, UNESCO, and many other companies, big and
small. See [1] for a list. These companies and organizations may be
interested in some sort of support, or may provide funding through
sponshorships, so that the project is kept alive and up to date with new
platforms and technologies. By listening to these user base we may learn
how to improve the platform and understand what their problems are
(installers?, UI improvements?, geo and map support?). And they may even
want to donate code they built over the years.
- Another part of the NetBeans user base is formed by Java
(C/C++/Ruby/PHP) developers that prefer to use NetBeans as their IDE.
NetBeans is well positioned as an IDE for PHP and C/C++ in Unix
environments. I don't know what funding could be in these, maybe
crowfunding is an option, as you say. Another option (a difficult one)
is forking commercial products that concentrate in specific
areas/requirements (say an IDE for R projects?) and that is funded by
subscriptions, much like IntelliJ is doing.
[1] https://platform.netbeans.org/screenshots.html
