NetBeans is open source. At least OpenOffice and Hudson have already been forked. Are there any obstacles (name has to be changed of course) for forking this project as well?
XP has the "windows rot" problem. After it has been in use for a couple of months, it slows down significantly and especially booting it takes forever. Some people claim that they can avoid this but I have never seen any hard evidence :)
Good point. And I don't think classpath exception would apply here. I'd be interested to hear if someone has actually seen this source code "in the wild".
AFAIK the code which makes the Swing UI use native OSX (Cocoa) instead of X is Apple proprietary. I wonder whether Apple will now give that to Oracle or release it as Open Source. Otherwise we're going to be stuck with X Server and ugly UIs for a long time :-(
In my experience (last 5 years in MegaCorporations) the problem is that the people who are actually hands-on managing the offshoring projects are different from those who make the decisions. The guys who decide to offshore are usually at least 2-3 layers of management above.
The urge to offshore software development at that level is strong, and the management sees it as a megatrend which "we'll have to follow because everyone else is doing it".
The feedback loop is broken, the decision maker who offshores a certain project is no longer there when a couple of years later it's clear that the whole thing was a disaster. He's busy offshoring some other project.
Last time I tried BitBucket it just didn't work over my employer's http proxy. Googled it and it was some unresolved issue back then, lots of people had the same problem.
Exactly. I work in medical hw/sw and I can tell you the amount of bureucracy is insane and everything is orders of magnitude harder than any non-regulated business. Open Source itself is not really a problem, we use a lot of it (os, libs, etc.).