Oracle new support community: no code sharing? closed?
Eddie Awad says that My Oracle Support Community is due to launch later this week. Looking through the slides there is much to admire. It sure beats the heck out of the SAP Community for looks though seems more or less on a par with features. It uses a similar points system to encourage contributions as that used on SCN but doesn't exactly say how it operates. But...
On slide 9: 'The Donts' it says: Sharing code. What? When I saw it I thought that's got to be a mistake and maybe it is. Mind you, knowing Oracle, maybe it isn't.
This is none too pleasing to Eddie's correspondents. Joel Garry notes:
OK, I didn’t spend too much time looking at this, but one thing caught my eye: No sharing code. WTF? We can hardly get people to say exactly what they are doing now! I’d quote some notorious forum posts, but I don’t want to embarrass anybody specifically, since there are a lot of people generally who don’t want to take the time to ask good questions.
Did they mean proprietary code?
I lol when I see anything called “My…” anyways. I can’t help thinking of a local adult contemporary radio station that had a series of TV ads showing this lady dressing as purported listeners of other radio station formats. She looked better as a metalhead with bad attitude than as the adult contemporary!
Running communities is hard work says he speaking as one who is intimately involved in projects of this kind. I feel sorry for Eddie and his ilk. If this is really what Oracle means then it kills the project stone dead. Developers like to share code - it's what the 'make guys' do.
I really hope that Oracle gets this fixed quickly because given that they are actually easier to deal with than SAP from an experimental developers' viewpoint, to drop this particular ball seems all wrong.
The community is only available to those on premium support. I say this is wrong too. The SCN site is pretty much free to view, search and pore over though there are some 'closed' areas for SAP Mentors and you need a login to drop comments. That process is pretty much open with very light vetting on SAP's part. The point of modern developer communities is to allow the free collaboration between members. That's how progress is made and how innovation emerges.
While they may be commercial enemies, the fact is that SAP and Oracle developers can both benefit from each others' experience. Oracle is the de facto database for SAP Business Suite deployments so it doesn't make sense to not have equal access to both environments.
Having sort of drawn level with SAP in the community stakes, it will be interesting to see that company's response.
Disclosure: I am an SAP Mentor