
James Gosling leaves Oracle - past
http://nighthacks.com/roller/jag/entry/time_to_move_on
======
strlen
Where would somebody like Gosling go to find a home? In other words, what Sun-
like industry Research _and_ Development centers (not _just_ research shops or
application software vendors) remain?

Microsoft the software company has a competing technology to sell you.
Microsoft Research _does not_ ship code. IBM and HP are professional services,
not technology R&D companies. RedHat's JBoss division had been (very
positively) driving the direction of Java EE, but they're much more of a
consulting/software vendor (focused on enterprise software, not on programming
languages) than an R&D shop.

Google would be the most likely candidate: they use Java extensively, make
their own JVM and contribute to Apache Harmony. They do highly advanced R&D
work (you could say they're the modern day Bell Labs), but most fruits of it
are internal (with some work ending up as research papers and a very tiny
fraction going out as open source).

Seems like something is missing: a first-class R&D shop that's a home to top
technologists (who aren't interested wealth through entrepreneurship, but
would rather work on many different, challenging projects -- something focused
start-ups can't provide) _and_ which ships software and hardware to the world.
I'd _love_ to see Google step up to that plate, but is that realistic?

~~~
davi
_you could say they're the modern day Bell Labs_

I think this comparison is unduly favorable to Google.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_devel...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs#Discoveries_and_developments)

~~~
strlen
Certainly agreed. I could say "a modern day runner-up to Bell Labs".
Nonetheless they employ actual Bell labs people (Rob Pike, Kernighan, etc...).

~~~
hga
And Pike and Ken Thompson have gifted us with Go
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28programming_language%29>).

~~~
known
And Google doesn't use Go in their production systems.

~~~
hga
Well ... UNIX back in the old days was something of a moonlight or stealth
project. Then they got money for an original PDP-11 (later the 11/20) for a
specific project or task, serious text processing as I recall, and that lead
to the money for their PDP-11/45 (significant since its split I and D allowed
for 64KB of code, 56KB of data and 8KB of stack (the latter split due to the
45's MMU), significant because that allowed much larger programs to be written
(as I recall the 11/20's architecture left the last 8KB for devices)).

That's why nroff (from a Multics program, as I recall) and troff were such a
big thing back then, troff would output to a professional phototypesetter. And
they had upstream piped software that would DTRT with e.g. typesetting math.
And this _was_ practical, all parts of AT&T had a lot of manuals and papers to
produce.

At some later point, AT&T/Bell Labs realized they had something seriously
useful here, and the research people got funding for OS work while Western
Electric forked UNIX for AT&T production work. (You can find this all in the
appropriate histories, I know it from them and from starting with V6 in the
summer of 1978 and writing my final project in nroff for a XEROX Daisywheel
printer.)

Anyway, my point here, going back to the original point, was that Bell Labs
per se was much more of a pure research lab, and it was the job of Western
Electric to turn some of their output into stuff they'd use in the system.

And Bell Labs was a tacit part of the monopoly agreement that gave AT&T all
the telephony business in the US that they wanted, it was "a price of doing
business". That's why they couldn't sell research UNIX (Vx) for real money,
things like the transistor weren't locked down with evil patent terms, etc.
etc.

In other words, not a situation we expect to see repeated after the '80s
breakup.

Right now Go is in an alpha stage (significant parts are missing and known to
be needed, code you write _will_ get broken) ... we should perhaps judge it
more by guessing whether Google will eventually use it if and when it's of
production quality. In the meanwhile, we can look at them as a fairly unique
company that _really_ understands that technology is a competitive advantage
and that having some of that be open source is good for them.

See Joel S. on how companies desire to commoditize their supporting
technologies. Google's open source browser and mobile phone and netbook OS
projects are examples them doing very directed projects that support their
real business. Indirectly they do things like hire Mr. Python.

------
bitdiddle
No surprise here. It's too bad the IBM/Sun talks broke down, I think it would
have been a much better marriage.

~~~
rbanffy
That would mean the death of SPARC. How could this be good?

Well... It's better than Microsoft, I guess. The thought of a "Windows 7
Server for SPARC Enterprise Edition Plus" is frightening.

~~~
johnohara
Glad HN is not slashdot. Please elaborate why selling more SPARC servers would
not have been a good thing for the many SUN employees affected by the merger.

~~~
gvb
The OP hypothesized merger between IBM and Sun would have been better than
Oracle/Sun. If IBM had bought Sun, they would probably have killed the SPARC
because IBM has their own RISC CPU, the Power series.

Brian Aker says "I'm sure everything else Sun owned looked nice and
scrumptious, but Oracle bought Sun for the hardware."
[http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/a-mysql-update-from-
brian-a...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/04/a-mysql-update-from-brian-
aker.html) which means the SPARC survives.

[edit: proper quote]

~~~
nailer
IBM maintain their mainframe business. While nobody's writing new applications
for ZSeries, much like SPARC, there are some very profitable, untouched apps
that run on Solaris 8/SPARC and they'll be around till the company gets the
time and budget to port them.

------
gphil
this doesn't bode well for (ex) sun products if oracle is imposing significant
cultural changes on former sun employees.

------
prog
Can anyone involved in or close to the Java/OpenJDK comment on what this might
mean for Java/JDK/JVM?

~~~
axod
Unless they log into all machines running java and break them, why does it
particularly matter? What's the worry here?

~~~
prog
I am just wondering how involved Gosling is in JDK (in terms of roadmap, new
features and such) now a days ... or is it primarily driven by the community?

~~~
rbanffy
I don't think he has a close BDFL-style involvement with the Java SDK or
standard library. From what I can observe, Java is, and has been, committee-
driven since about 2000.

And Gosling is too expensive to write code. His time is much better used in
conferences, motivating developers.

~~~
pavs
I find it funny how you can be too expensive to code. I wonder when was the
last time billionaires like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Sergey Brin coded for a
large project just for the love of coding.

~~~
jlmendez
Has Steve Jobs ever coded?, I know Gates and Brin did at some point. A quick
search revealed a quote from Wozniak: "Steve jobs never programmed in his
life." <http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2006/10/5672.ars>

~~~
pavs
Wow, I had no idea. Thanks for the info. According to Wikipedia, he worked at
Atari creating circuit board for games.

~~~
rbanffy
Legend says he sub-hired Woz for a fraction of what he was being paid.

At that time, games were "programmed" with hardware too, so, it would no
qualify as a programming job.

------
mkramlich
to Mr. Gosling: thank you for your work on Java!

I hope you take much deserved time off then maybe end up at one of the newer
brain trusts like Google.

~~~
benatkin
Well said, mkramlich!

------
jacktang
Will Gosling join in IBM?

~~~
akadien
It seems logical he will end up at Google working on Android.

------
RyanMcGreal
Another elf leaves Middle Earth.

~~~
paulbaumgart
In case that didn't make sense to you, it's a reference to:
[http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
eart...](http://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-
earth-%E2%80%93-soda%E2%80%99s-are-no-longer-free/)

~~~
swombat
I think it's more likely to be a reference to Lord of the Rings. There's no
need for the Steve Blank sub-reference for that statement to make sense.

------
chmike
Will Gosling work at Apple ? (just kidding)

------
grrrr
On the topic of Java, anyone know what's happening with the Java app store? No
doubt it will fail to reach critical mass with the public, but it's a shame.
Had Java had a more presentable front end and Sun been more commercial they
could have started the trend for apps many years back.

