Back in 2009 I wrote about how it was sad in some ways that Sun had been acquired by Oracle. 4 years later, we now hear that GlassFish is being relegated to the domain of the Reference Implementation. Once again I have mixed feelings about this event. Despite GlassFish being seen as a competitor to our own offerings, there was always a grudging respect for what that team had done, and several of them now work for Red Hat, often as a direct result of those efforts. So in that regard it is sad to see it go. However, what worries me the most about this turn of events isn't so much about the technology, but rather what signals this could send to their open source communities. I will leave that mainly as an exercise to the reader, but it doesn't really take a massive leap to be concerned if you are a member of those communities. Now I'm not going to suggest that Red Hat's projects such as WildFly, or any other open source vendor, are necessarily a better home for those community members who feel that it is time to move on, but I would hope that they would at least take a look and judge us on our track record.