What Oracle Could Do For GlassFish Now 📎
- Move the sources to GitHub (GitHub is the most popular collaboration platform). It is more likely for an individual to contribute via GitHub, than the current infrastructure.
- Introduce a business friendlier license like e.g. the Apache license. Companies interesting in providing added value (and commercial support) on top of existing sources would appreciate it.
- Implement GitHub-based, open source, CI system with nightly builds.
- Introduce a transparent voting process / pull-request acceptance process.
- Release more frequently.
- Keep https://glassfish.java.net as the main hub.
Community involvement is good for innovation beyond the scope of Java EE.
However: we will still need full-time engineers (and so Oracle) for the implementation of Java EE 8 RI. Java EE API implementation is far less fun and hard work. Oracle did so far a great job by writing the specifications and implementing them.
Such a bold move would foster innovation and make Java EE even more popular. Moving GlassFIsh sources to GitHub would also significantly boost Java's ranking in GitHub's programming languages index :-).
Dropping commercial support for GlassFish could also have positive effects. Modernization of the collaboration platform and making the contribution process more frictionless could indeed give GlassFish a contribution boost.