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Prime Mover of Java's Port to Linux Interviewed
jg21 writes "After Java 5, what will become of Calvin Austin now that he's lead engineer - and spec lead - in charge of J2SE on Linux? This interview shows him to be Sun's most personable developer asset after James Gosling. (Gosling BTW, who famously uses Mac OS rather than a PC, has a Linux box and uses the X support on OS X to run Java 5.) Asked what feature in the new Java edition he considered coolest of all, Austin without hesitation replied "Metadata" - the spec lead for that particular feature, Austin's former colleague at Sun Joshua Bloch, was headhunted recently by Google. Now Java, Linux, and Google would be quite a combo. Maybe that's what's fueling all the recent speculation that a Google browser would probably be a browser, feed reader, blog tool, desktop search, online search, gmail, news reader, photo editing, and online photo publishing all rolled into one."
(if you don't grok the reference, google it.)
"speculation that a Google browser would probably be a browser, feed reader, blog tool, desktop search, online search, gmail, news reader, photo editing, and online photo publishing all rolled into one"...
which, if true, would show that Google is being sucked into the Dark Side, becoming another msft.
After all, it probably wouldn't be an OSS effort, and the hyper-integration is reminiscent of the Win/IE integration trick.
OTOH, if it WERE oss, how does this swiss-army-knife abomination fit oss traditions?