James Gosling Grades Oracle's Handling of Sun's Tech

snydeq writes "With the four-year anniversary of Oracle's Sun Microsystems acquisition looming, InfoWorld reached out to Java founder James Gosling to rate how Oracle has done in shepherding Sun technology. Gosling gives Oracle eyebrow-raising grades, lauding Oracle's handling of Java, despite his past acrimony toward Oracle over Java (remember those T-shirts?), and giving Oracle a flat-out failing grade on what has become of Solaris OS."

Forgetting OpenOffice.org

[jordanjay29]

Even though it's since transitioned to Apache, Oracle still deserves to be graded on their handling of OO.o.

Re:Forgetting OpenOffice.org

[Rennt]

You are taking about the product itself, not Oracle's handling of the project.

Yes, OpenOffice could open your documents fine. It did all that stuff before Oracle came along, alienated the developer base and ran the project into the ground.

Re:Forgetting OpenOffice.org

[armanox]

My understanding was the developers simply left because Oracle acquired the product, not because of anything they did.

Java in the server, in the client, in the browser

[gwolf]

Are three very different things. Java in the server and in the client is alive and very very much healthy. Ugly and slow applets in the browser thankfully are almost dead — Because HTML5 delivered way better. But applets dying off does not in any way mean Java is any less healthy!

No mention of SPARC?

[kry73n]

SPARC has seen more advances in the 4 years under ORACLE then in the previous 15 years under Sun. I actually enjoy reading about their tech every now and then. But unless they open up Solaris again to attract the open source community the only thing that keeps it alive is backwards compatibility of legacy software.

Re:Java in the server, in the client, in the brows

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is Java in the client has tainted perception of Java on the server. Many execs (ie the ones the write the cheques) see Java as something untrustworthy and dangerous and really I can't blame them, If they make such braindead decisions on the client side what is to stop them doing equally dumb shit on the server end.

Re:An F- for the handling of Solaris

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linux kernel actually runs unmodified on tiny ARM microprocessors (much smaller than your typical low-end smartphone); right up to the largest single-system-image machines ever made (the 4096 CPU Altix machines); and the world's most powerful supercomputers.

Now you know of another OS that does it better than Solaris.

Re:An F- for the handling of Solaris

[drinkypoo]

No dependable only repository of packages that is robust or up to date. Far to much package hunting still required to locate software for solaris. Most packages are months to years behind there linux counterparts.

This is something that has boggled my mind for nigh-on twenty years. Eighteen of them, I guess. Linux came with all the latest tools, but in order to get them for Solaris you'd have to download some old tools and use them to build some new tools. Ultimately I think it's really all about selling you the sunspro compilers, or whatever they're called now, two decades on. If it's too easy to just use gcc, nobody will ever buy sunspro, for which they want a massive stack of cash. It's the only compiler that generates very good SPARC code, and it costs a million billion dollars so many people didn't bother to buy it, and went GCC instead. And then they were throwing away performance. If you're going to run those tools, you might as well run them on x86-Linux. And in fact, that's been eroding Solaris steadily for all this time.

Re:Java in the server, in the client, in the brows

[jellomizer]

So what can you program in that those execs will give you a green light for? I mean they really don't make good decisions off of their choices. They really just pick what they think they like.

PHP/Python/Ruby etc... It is those nasty open source freeware programs that may be out of style in a few year, we don't want to use those. (and they don't seem to have those mythical enterprise features that they want, but yet never tell us what they are)
C/C++ Too cumbersome to code in, doesn't allow for Rapid Development
C#/VB.NET Well they are fine for little apps, we want something a little more heavy duty. Sometimes you will get a better debate about needing a more scailable servers then what Microsoft can provide.
COBOL/FORTRAN/FoxPro etc... These old languages.

Unfortunately Java, even with its security problems is seen as the best enterprise choice, because Companies thinks for some ungodly stupid reason that Enterprise software is some how good.