James Gosling: thoughts about Java, Sun, IBM, Google, Oracle, Microsoft, etc.

[diogen]

The Father of Java about the technology world - and its players - over the last 20 years. Very interesting!

Just a few perls"

(James is wearing a t-shirt depicting Larry Ellison's face on a TV screen, with Java's mascot Duke throwing a hammer at it like in the old Apple 1984-esque commercials)

I eventually graduated in '83. Went to work for IBM which is, you know, is within the top 10 of my stupidist career decisions I've made.

It's {Oracle lawsuit against Google} all about money. There's nothing else in there. With Oracle it doesn't have to make sense, it just has to make money.
At Sun we'd done an analysis and yeah, there's a bunch of patents violated here...Because lawyers just like to make revenue. And I'm sure they were looking at the license fees they were getting from Microsoft. Microsoft .NET just smears over a huge pile of Sun patents. When they did the .NET design, they basically cut and pasted from the Java spec. The way that they did CLR, you know they swizzled the way the instruction set went but the way this thing really operated, they exercised essentially no creativity when coming up with .NET. They've done some things since then that have been kind of good but as part of the various court cases we ended up with this rather odd patent deal with them that involved them paying us fairly tasty amounts of money. And I'm sure that the lawyers looked at the Microsoft numbers and said, yeah I want that from Google

Like QAing the math libraries. Like doing QA on sine and cosine, you absolutely have to have a PHd in Mathematics. Sine and cosine: it sounds really simple, but there is unbelievable amount of depths of subtlety in there. There are extraordinarily few people on the planet qualified to QA that type of stuff.

And here is the best part: he is Canadian!!

Diogen.

EDIT:
Forgot the link
http://www.basementcoders.com/transcripts/James_Gosling_Transcript.html

 

[diogen]

And just like Gosling implied, not everything is clean in Google's Java usage in Android
Google responds to Oracle's Android patent lawsuit, we break it down -- Engadget

Obviously, calls to make Earth a better place to live (by open sourcing Java the RIGHT way) mean nothing to Ellison...

And if St. Jobs asks him politely, he might sue every Android handset maker, too...

Diogen.

 

[diogen]

After reading for the first time about "deprecating Java", I couldn't really understand what it meant
Apple threatens Java with death on the Mac ? The Register

But it looks like St. Jobs feels he can walk on water and decide what technology lives and which one dies.
First, Flash, now Java. First, iPhones, now Macs. Many see this as a shot at the Android (i.e. Java) developers.

And it didn't take long for Gosling to notice this dynamic
Gosling blows lid off Jobs Java nonsense ? The Register

Diogen.

 

[diogen]

Not exactly unexpected but still: Gosling accepts a job offer from Google
James gosling joins google- The Inquirer

I liked the last paragraph

We can speculate that part of what Gosling might soon find himself working on will be helping Google
fend off Oracle's pending lawsuit against Android, which alleges that parts of Android infringe
Oracle's copyrights and patents on Java. As the founder of Java, he's just the person to do that.

Diogen.