On Nov 9, 2008, at 18:30 , Richard S. Hall wrote:
Kit Plummer wrote:
This might not really be appropriate for the list, but I'm curious
nonetheless.
Has anyone considered a commercial entity to front the Open Source
project, or at least discussed the potential? I'm only really
asking this because I know ALL of the "players" are doing something
with OSGi these days. Or, is the intent to keep Felix pure. And,
if I'm out-of-line for asking this question - sorry.
There is nothing pure or unpure about needing to make money, that's
just a fact of life.
We haven't really talked about creating a company amongst ourselves,
but I know that some companies that support Felix (e.g., Luminis)
have talked about providing commercial support too (Marcel?).
First of all, I fully agree that current build tools are far from
perfect, especially if you look at integration with Eclipse, but also
if you look at the whole software development process, from initial
development, to quality testing, to releases and support updates. This
is where the flexibility of components can really bite you because
it's hard to maintain lots of customized installations of your products.
At luminis we have software provisioning tooling to solve this
problem, and we are currently looking at adding support for developers
to use this very same system to quickly build and run OSGi
applications. Parts of this system, such as the deployment admin
implementation, we donated to Felix and I don't want to make this
sound as a marketing pitch. We do provide commercial support for
Felix, and have used it in several projects where it and several other
open source OSGi bundles have helped our customers build products
quicker and more relyable.
Judging from the previous posts, the issues we're talking about now
are mostly about integrating the current tools and adapting them to
work on OSGi projects. Eclipse should support OSGi development out of
the box, but it only does if you stick to their model of one bundle
per project. Maven is a bit the same in that respect. Ant gives you
more freedom, but also more work if you have to set it up from
scratch. I'm not even sure if Ant or Maven are the best solution for
OSGi development, to be honest. On the other hand, I don't think
commercial development tools stand a chance of being profitable in
this market either.
I know Peter Kriens has done a lot of thinking about better build
systems for OSGi. Perhaps he has something to add to this discussion.
Greetings, Marcel
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