James Gosling left Oracle
In his blog, James Gosling has announced that he left Oracle earlier this month. Back, in the mid nineties, Gosling co-invented Java, the language and the virtual machine, while working for Sun. The dream, at that time, was to write software once and run it anywhere. That is, on all machines that can run the Java Virtual Machine. A great paradigm shift in software. Sun was acquired by Oracle last year.
For many, his resignation was expected. I am not saying that it was inevitable but one can very easily imagine that the vision Oracle has for Java is very different from the vision Gosling has. After all, paying money to own Java is totally different from putting your heart and soul, and a good bulk of your life time to create it. In his blog, he wisely avoided getting into explanations and details; at best, one can imagine his mixed feelings about it.
As for the future of Java, no one can really say, not even top management in Oracle. The future is something still to be crafted, not ordered by giants. With the advent of dot net platform, someone said that thousands of existing systems rely on Java; these systems won’t go away over night. In addition, Java hasn’t been standing still; Java has been incorporating several modern features over the last few years.
On the other hand, as they say, change is the only constant; in technology just as in life. No matter how we feel, no product or technology is perfect for all times. At a point of time, I could have never imagined seeing a book titled Java Pitfalls. Sometimes, we just forget that today’s top technology is just a milestone in our collective learning curve and progress. We just have to keep our eyes and mind open for new challenges and opportunities.
We can only express greatest respect to this history maker, James Gosling, and look forward to his next contribution in our field.
Let us know what you think about it. Leave a comment.
thanks Hazem for the great blog, you summed things up quite adequately. James Gosling is really a history maker, maybe he should be a freelancer and an advocate for Java and opensource in general. I really hope that Java can survive Oracle and other IT giants.
Very interesting website. I am so looking forward to reading more posts.
Excellent post, went ahead and bookmarked your site. I can’t wait to read more from you.
Hi Hazem,
Very interesting blog.
I believe as you pointed that JAVA future would be determined by the “Market Dynamics”; I believe also that Oracle is the main factor in determining how these dynamics will work.
In fact i think that SUN was a huge meal that Oracle is trying to swallow now and to merge in its culture. (Gosling leave may be a part of this culture normalization
)
I think that Oracle, after complete swallowing of SUN, would exert a lot of efforts in pushing the market dynamics toward Oracle based java technologies instead of SUN based ones.
I.e. I think that Oracle would push for Oracle application server instead of SUN Glassfish.
You know, I read somewhere that even developers of MySQL and Open Office are leaving and organizing independent entities to support their brainchild, independent from Oracle. I’ll check and post links
This is actually the second moment I’ve encountered your web sites in the last couple weeks. Appears like I ought to bookmark it.
I learn something new on different blogs everyday. It is always refreshing to read posts of other bloggers and learn something from them. Thanks for sharing.