NetBeans Development Environment Recognized as Apache Primary Project

Apache Software Foundation Organization announced on making the NetBeans IDE an Apache primary project. In autumn 2016 Oracle made a decision to transfer the project to the Apache Foundation, after which it transferred 4 million lines of code and the rights to all NetBeans-related source code, as well as the NetBeans trademark, the netbeans.org domain, and some infrastructure. The remaining 1.5 million lines of code, covering modules to support Java, JavaScript, PHP, and Groovy, were transferred in 2018 year.

Since October 2016, the project has been in the Apache Incubator, where the ability to follow the development and management principles accepted in the Apache community and based on the ideas of meritocracy was tested. While in the incubator, Apache NetBeans releases were generated 9, 10 и 11, which were released with limited support for programming languages ​​(Java, PHP, JavaScript, and Groovy). C/C++ support is expected to return in a future release.

Apache NetBeans is now recognized as ready to stand on its own with no additional oversight. The project components have been relicensed - the code has been transferred from the GPLv2 and CDDL copyleft licenses to the Apache 2.0 license. The reason for the transfer of the project was the desire to continue development in a neutral site with an independent management model in order to facilitate the participation of representatives of the community and other companies in the development of the project (for example, internal projects based on NetBeans are being developed by Boeing, Airbus, NASA and NATO).

Recall that the NetBeans project was based in 1996 by Czech students in order to create an analogue of Delphi for Java. In 1999, the project was bought by Sun Microsystems, and in 2000 it was published in source code and transferred to the category of free projects. In 2010, NetBeans was taken over by Oracle, which took over Sun Microsystems. Over the years, NetBeans has evolved as the go-to environment for Java developers, competing with Eclipse and IntelliJ IDEA, but recently it has been making a big comeback for JavaScript, PHP, and C/C++ as well. NetBeans has an active user base of 1.5 million developers.

Source: opennet.ru