Blogging Roller

I caused a little stir yesterday with my "oh the shame" post, Sam Ruby picked up on it and several others took notice. I think most people realize that I was just having some fun with words and ranting. I know Sun didn't actually steal anything from O'Reilly and I don't really think O'Reilly's weblogging software is rinky-dink. However, there was some truth there. I do think the java.net blogs would benefit from more advanced blogging features. I'd like to help and I would (obviously) love to see them use Roller.

If the blogs on java.net are just provided for simple project news and RSS feeds, then I can understand the desire to keep the blogging module simple. If, on the other hand, these are going to be real weblogs with the personality and character of the blogs we read on java.blogs, then something better is needed.

Part of the java.net charter is to support the open source Java community and foster open source Java projects. I'd like to see java.net eat it's own dogfood and use open source Java rather than the open source Perl, PHP, Python, or whatever else it is that they are using now. Instead of the O'Reilly blog software, why not use Roller, Blojsom, JSP Wiki, or Snipsnap? If these aren't good enough, let's figure out why and make them better.

By the way, I have registered http://roller.dev.java.net (pending approval) to reserve the name and to start exploring the java.net features. If it looks good, I may migrate the Roller CVS, downloads, and mailing lists from SourceForge.