Appforge and Oracle?
Monday, April 16th, 2007Appforge is a mobile application tool developer that provides an IDE to cross-compile VB/C# code for Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm devices. It is a very nice cross-platform mobile app development tool. I reviewed it for the Jolts award in recent years.
Recently, it seems that Appforge is bought by Oracle and Oracle apparently decided to ditch the AppForge product — leaving a lot of unhappy customers. It is especially troubling since applications developed in Appforge need a CLIENT license to run (e.g., think of the JVM license in the Java world). If Oracle decides not to sell Appforge CLIENT licenses anymore, that would mean all Appforge applications in development would have to be abandoned. If I had built my mobile app development skills around the Appforge platform, I’d be very frustrated. Fortunately, Java ME is not going away anytime soon.
One thing Oracle can really do to help the Appforge community is to open source it. It does not cost Oracle anything since it does not plan to sell any more copies or support. But Oracle has been given more lip service to open source than to actually contribute anything. Will they do the right thing this time?