Q&A With James Gosling, Father of Java

Minaloush writes to tell us that in a recent Q&A with Sun's James Gosling, the father of Java fielded questions on the GPL, security, the role of Java in the enterprise. "If you come up with a good software development tool, that makes life easier for the developers and they can get their job done quicker, then the first thing the manager says is 'oh you've got free time on your hands. Do this extra thing'."

Re:What about Patrick Naughton?

[Frosty Piss]

He kind of was written out of the story after this (Wikipedia):

In September 1999, a FBI sting operation netted Naughton on charges related to the alleged solicitation of inappropriate sexual conduct with a minor. Disney immediately fired him shortly after his arrest in Santa Monica.

He got caught in one of those chat room stings, trying to set up a little get-together with some way-underage female.

Re:Why yet...

[teknopurge]

Is this a joke or a troll? Declining? Java is 54% of the corporate market for enterprise applications.

The WORA 'paradigm' as you called it is alive and well. j2se6 is fast - even swing is fast.

I've been using java for 9 years, first on the client and then on the server. The frameworks like struts, spring and shale are bringing religion and consistency to Java applications - and management LOVES consistency. Outside of corporate America, j2me is in most cell phones and set-tops.

Jobs on dice.com

'java' - 16156
'c#' - 6634
'asp' - 3521
'asp.net' - 4581
'.net' - 9097 (inclusive of previous keyword)

Fatality. Rayden(Gossling) Wins.

Re:Who's the mother?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your asexual reproduction comment must have touched a nerve with some moderators.

What explains Sun's change on Java?

[jbn-o]

Today Gosling says the "immense amount of testing and design work" is not thought to be "anywhere near as good as having thousands of talented eyeballs just stare at it and think about it", but he didn't always say this and Sun didn't always license Java software in line with this sentiment. Gosling's claim might be true, but I think the freedom Sun's relicensing gives users is far more significant. Also important for the free software community is the lesson of free software pressure.

Not long ago, Gosling poo-pooed the idea of turning Java into an "open source project" [devx.com]: "If Java turned into an open source project, the enterprise development community would go screaming into the hills.". In the same article, author Glen Kunene described Gosling as being "ambivalent about Apache's Harmony".

Similarly, Richard Stallman once described Java as being a trap [gnu.org] because one could write free software programs in Java that depended on features only non-free Java software provided. He also wrote about what a non-event it was that Sun allowed more people to distribute its then non-free Java software [gnu.org].

Taking all of these quotes and descriptions at face value, assuming nobody was lying, what explains the change in view? I believe that the competitive pressure created by free software Java implementations pushed Sun to stay relevant [digitalcitizen.info]. As the free software Java implementations became more functional and more likely to replace Sun's Java software, Sun saw they could free their implementation and continue to compete. In so doing, Sun also became a top contributor to the free software community and got free software luminaries (Stallman [digitalcitizen.info] and Eben Moglen [digitalcitizen.info]) to speak in support of their relicensing.

ugly child

[nanosquid]

People should remember that Java started out as a set-top language and was released when that project failed. Then, it was supposed to turn the web into an application delivery platform, and it failed miserably at that, too (Ajax is now succeeding there).

The reason Java isn't a footnote in history is because of the enormous efforts people and companies other than Gosling and Sun have invested in fixing up its problems and turning Java into a decent platform for server-side development.

As far as I'm concerned, the main credit Gosling deserves is for saddling us with some bad design choices and some really ugly backwards compatibility problems in Java.

Re:Isn't the old license quite a bit more restrict

[roscivs]

Isn't the old license quite a bit more restrictive than just passing a test suite? I mean, many Linux distros have either been requiring that the J2RE and so forth be downloaded from sun.java.com or they've been requiring that you download 3rd party implementations based on the Sun source like blackdown. It doesn't sound to me like the license was ever as laisez-faire as Gosling seems to be implying here.

The old license also had a clause that said you couldn't distribute the SDK with a competitor to Sun's implementation. This was probably intended (like the test suite restriction) to avoid any Microsoft-style "embrace and extend," but there was enough worry that distributing the SDK along with gcj was against the terms of the license that just about every Linux distro opted to distribute a non-Sun Java.

Re:Then the best ide is ....

[hey!]

Well, you must be pretty young, then. I've at least messed machines in the 4K range, worked professionally writing programs to fit in 16K, and I have several friends who are still working today who remember working with systems with 2K of RAM or less. Granted they're at about retirement age.

Of course you have to be careful because it wasn't until the late eighties that the industry completely standardized on the eight bit byte. Memory sizes in the late 70s and early 80s were usually specified in terms of "words", a word being the particular machine's most natural size operand for integer arithmetic. The PDP-8 came with 4KW of memory, where each word was 12 bits. Thus our 4KW of memory was in actuality a whopping 6KB of core memory. The PDP-10 had a 36 bit word; the very early versions that had "8K" memories actually had 36KB.

Bill Gates claims he never said that 640KB was all anybody would ever need. Back in 1981 he must certainly have been aware that some people needed more. You could buy a PDP-10 which could address 32 separate segments of 256KW. Since each word was 4.5 bytes, each segment amounted to 1024KB, giving a total of 36MB (36.864MB you use powers of ten instead of powers of two).