

Gosling: So Long Old Friend - fogus
http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/so_long_old_friend

======
jacquesm
That was not funny. I saw the title and thought: "Oh shit, James Gosling
dead".

~~~
edw519
It _really_ scared me. He and I have a lot in common...

We were born on the same day.

He earned his PhD at Carnegie-Mellon at the same time I earned my MBA down the
street at Pitt.

We both made it to California in the 80's.

Neither of us embraced anything Microsoft.

He invented Java and I drank Java.

We still haven't met. Someday, I hope.

fogus, _please_ fix that title.

~~~
huhtenberg
Not to forget that you both eat salt.

------
dschobel
I think it's in response to:

 _21/01/2010 15:12 (10:09 minutes ago) The FINANCIAL -- The European
Commission has approved under the EU Merger Regulation the proposed
acquisition of US hardware and software vendor Sun Microsystems Inc. by Oracle
Corporation, a US enterprise software company._

[http://www.finchannel.com/Main_News/Business/56479_EU_approv...](http://www.finchannel.com/Main_News/Business/56479_EU_approves_Oracles_bid_for_Sun_Microsystems_/)

~~~
rbanffy
Specially to the "light a candle part"...

------
wooster
It's interesting to compare this to the Apple acquisition of NeXT, wherein the
NeXT engineers wore t-shirts depicting the NeXT cube eating the Apple logo.

~~~
abstractbill
That's awesome! Do you happen to know if there are any photos floating around?
Google Images couldn't find anything for me.

~~~
dbul
[http://www.jewelryluv.com/WebObjects/Jewelry.woa/Contents/We...](http://www.jewelryluv.com/WebObjects/Jewelry.woa/Contents/WebServerResources/NeXT_Apple_lunch.jpg)

Bing images (where I found that) and Bing maps have been a great resource for
me. Google is still empirically top for web search, though.

------
abstractbill
I got my start with Unix on a SPARCstation while interning at British Telecom.
I used it to build a website (using C++ and Oracle for the backend - must have
been in 1993 or 1994, when the web was still fairly uncommon outside of big
companies and academia).

I clearly remember coming home from work and raving to axod about how rad Sun
was because they did some fairly high-level graphics operations in _hardware_
(at the time he was doing a lot of VGA programming in x86 assembler, so I
think this impressed him).

------
nas
A pretty classic case of the Innovator's Dilemma, IMHO. Sun hardware was
kickass but cheap PC servers eventually beat them out.

~~~
rbanffy
Insane market positioning.

They aimed for the high-end server market. Sun has nothing in the price-range
of a low-end Dell. It's not that it's impossible to do - I bet they could.
They just never tried because building high-end stuff is way cooler.

Being Windows-proof didn't help either. It is a virtue on my book, but not
many people agree with me.

~~~
hga
See my comment about how Sun made it impossible for a start up to buy a
moderate quantity of these servers. People were willing to buy Sun quality but
ended up buying Dell because Dell wanted to do business with them, which then
lost them the follow on sales for those who made it big.

------
zandorg
In the image, it's got the Linux penguin mourning the company it helped to
kill, and yet nobody mentions Linux in the whole comments thread?

Just curious... Is the other creature BSD or Amiga?

~~~
jurjenh
I'm pretty sure that's the Java thingy (for lack of a better term) - not sure
if it's actually got a name or not...

~~~
tspiteri
He is the Java mascot, and his name is Duke.

<http://kenai.com/projects/duke/pages/Home>

------
neovive
What ever happened to the Save MySQL petition started by Monty? I guess
MariaDB will start gaining some traction in the near future.

~~~
rbanffy
Or not.

Or Drizzle.

Or PostgreSQL.

------
rbanffy
a) Sun is not dead - the brand is still relevant, It's nice for Oracle to have
a hardware branch.

b) The illustration is not appropriate (Sun is not dead, see a)

c) If Gosling is leaving Sun, it's totally inappropriate to leave with an
illustration that more or less declares his former employer dead.

This isn't nice.

~~~
mbreese
Yes it is... Sun the company (and culture) is very much dead. It's only a
matter of time before the ticker symbol "JAVA" stops tickering.

The brand might still have some value, but I'm not sure how much... or if it
wouldn't be better for Oracle to rebrand Sun gear as Oracle gear.

My first thought though was "Gosling is leaving Sun?" That didn't make much
sense to me either...

~~~
kls
Not only that but I believe that Java just fragmented. we will see IBM Java,
Oracle Java, Apache Java and JBoss Java.

~~~
mbreese
We already have that though... Now Oracle even has two: Sun's and BEA's. The
only thing that was keeping it together was the JCP and the test suite. I'm
not sure what is going to come out of that. Whatever it is, I wouldn't put any
money on the process getting any better or faster.

Perhaps we'll start to see more things like Dalvik. It's like Java the
language, but not Java(tm).

