NetBeans

From APIDesign

NetBeans is an open source project that develops NetBeans Platform and an IDE based on top of it. I am the last NetBeans founder still working on the project even now, when it has been moved to Apache.

NetBeans started as a student project called Xelfi at Charles University in middle of nineteen nineties. It turned into a company lead by Roman Staněk in late summer of 1997:

In October 1999 Sun Microsystem bought NetBeans. In May 2000 Sun turned NetBeans software into Open source project.

In April 2009 when IBM was close to acquire Sun, we (internal Sun developers working on NetBeans and community evangelizing it and making money on selling trainings and support for the NetBeans Platform) got really scared and started to seek for a rescue plan. We even set a wiki (not this one, different, independent) up with a hope to form independent organization to continue development of the NetBeans Platform.

However, before we could take any action, the Sun management changed their minds and negotiated new acquisition by Oracle. That gave us new hope, we started to believe we are not the primary target for liquidation. Still we knew we need to formulate long term strategy for NetBeans and JDeveloper.

Since ages (e.g. version 4.0) NetBeans focused on smooth integration of external build tools (Ant, later Maven, but also Gradle). I always considered that good, but maybe I am too DevOps oriented!