How to Make Unmaintainable Project Maintainable - GlassFish Example

Presented at EclipseCon 2023 in Ludwigsburg, Germany by David Matějček (Omnifish OU).

Eclipse GlassFish, Oracle GlassFish, Sun GlassFish, SunOne ... names changed, but the software still contains parts which did not change much in all those years. Until now.

Eclipse GlassFish has a new team of committers and contributors which started pushing GlassFish and everything related forward again. How is it hard? How is it possible? How radical changes the team does? Are they backward compatible? Is the backward compatibility so critical requirement? How important are those changes? How risky are those changes? How risky is to not to do them? Where does the GlassFish swim?