Here’s an interview I did for DZone a while back about Red Hat’s involvement with OpenJDK.
Some additional useful links :
OpenJDK project
IcedTea project
IcedTea history
Gary Benson’s Blog
Andrew Hughes’ Blog
Andrew Haley’s Blog
Lillian Angel’s Blog
Mark Wielaard’s Blog
I’m still amazed by the diversity of wildlife we see in North Carolina (and previously in California). I seem to remember very little about English wildlife other than Hedgehogs, Crows and the occasional Fox and numerous brown and grey bugs. Contrast that two these two colorful critters spotted in the last few days. The first are a pair (male and female) of Black and Yellow Garden Spiders – named for their Black and Yellowness and their location in the Garden no doubt.
The pictures are a bit crap as I had to poke my arm through the undergrowth and click.
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The next encounter was a bit further a-field – North Topsail Beach to precise. This stunning Yellow Io Moth wanted to hitch a ride home with us. A bit of prodding made her open her wings before we put her safely on the ground.
As expected, JavaOne was interesting. For the first time in 12 years I actually attended more than a couple of sessions; but that isn’t why it was interesting. It was interesting because we witnessed the ceremonial passing of the Java One torch from Sun to Oracle and a fairly public goodbye from Schwartz and McNealy.
By all standards it was a pretty lightly attended Java One – I expected it to be a lot lighter given the economy, the uncertainty around Java and the Bacon Fever – so I was actually pleasantly surprised. Outside of Sun itself – I think JBoss was probably the largest software vendor on the pavilion floor – that says something.
Despite the low attendance overall – we had very solid attendance at our mini-theatre sessions – I think ours was one of the few booths that drew a crowd (without having to give stuff away) – so all in all it was a good show for us.
I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t the the last Java One; and as the crews started dismantling the pavilion – I felt like I should be trying to rip down a sign or banner – some memento to remind me of the fun times I’ve had at Java One over the years.
A lot of people were questioning the future of Java at the show (as usual) but I still firmly believe it’s going to be safe enough for the next 20 or 30 years – more than long enough for most of us. I don’t think Oracle will do anything stupid; though given the size and complexity of Sun I think they’re bound to make mistakes – it’s up to us to tell them when they do and to help resolve them.
As anyone who knows Java One – it’s about the people you meet – not the content. And so it is with Java – it’s about the people / community / ecosystem – at the end of the day – no single company has really owned Java for a long time.
Update : My pictures and Marek Goldmann’s pictures on Flickr.
I’d like to think of myself as an informed prognosticator having worked for Sun for almost 9 years; but this is prognostication nonetheless. I missed my chance to say what I thought of an IBM acquisition but I’ll start by saying – I think I preferred it – it probably would’ve been a better outcome for the things I care about.
The things I care about are the people I know who still work for Sun, the Java ecosystem, and many of Sun’s Open Source projects that I directly or indirectly benefit from – specifically MySQL (this post will live in MySQL), OpenJDK and OpenOffice.
It still seems like a strange merger – sure, Sun and Oracle have a huge shared installed based – Sun Servers + Solaris + BEA + Oracle DBMS was the killer enterprise stack for a decade – that alone gives Oracle a vice-like grip on existing customers; but that’s about the past – not the future. I think someone did the analysis and realized it’s a marginally positive move – so I don’t think this is the big technology vision realized that Oracle are trying to promote.
I’m sure a lot of people at Sun and customers of Sun are glad the uncertainty has come to an end but unfortunately it hasn’t. I’m guessing that it will take until the end of the year before Oracle tells the world what they’re keeping and what they’re dropping. FWIW – here’s my informed guess :
Storage / Servers – the press-briefing made the merger sound like it was all about the hardware (servers and storage). I just don’t see Oracle as a hardware company and they have more to loose than gain by pissing HP off. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some or all the hardware got sold off to HP, Fujitsu, etc. And I think Oracle could probably recover $3.5-4 bn of their $5bn outlay by doing so.
NetBeans – I’m not changing my mind – it’s done for. Oracle has two Java IDEs already – they don’t need a third. Oracle will pick up some great tools developers to write a migration tool but that’s about it.
OpenOffice – Oracle doesn’t like M$ but I doubt they can find a fiscally rational reason to carry the torch for Open Source and at the end of the day Oracle are doing this because it makes financial sense. I think Oracle will expect “the community” to pick up the slack.
Solaris – I think they’ll milk the legacy installed base (which is huge) but the innovation won’t continue. I think there’s an interesting opportunity for Oracle to manage the migration of the last of the Solaris holdouts to Linux. They could do this by GPLing Solaris and moving some of the Solaris features to Linux; or more likely to an Oracle proprietary OS built on Linux.
Middleware – Oracle have everything Sun has – and Oracle are by and large market leaders with large market and revenue share. Sun have one or two products that might survive and certainly some components. Oracle inherit a commitment to continue to produce the Java EE RI (and others) so Glassfish *might* survive – but Oracle have demonstrated that they don’t have appetite to maintain many products in the same market (see how quickly OC4J got killed after the BEA acquisition ?)
MySQL – I think Oracle will continue to do what Sun did somewhat accidentally – namely slowly kill it off.
Java – I’m confident that Oracle won’t fix the JCP and won’t sacrifice control for the good of the ecosystem. I also think the JCP will become a battlefield for IBM and Oracle and we’ll all be the worse for it.
OpenJDK – no-body needs two JDK’s to maintain – I think Oracle would have to move some of the monitoring / diagnostics from JRockit into a proprietary OpenJDK-based platform. JRockit has a small market share but some nice features for enterprise customers.
Cloud – not that there’s much there there but I don’t expect to see Larry eating his words.
Virtualization – I don’t really understand Oracle’s virtualization strategy other than the feeling that Larry Ellison is unlikely to entertain anything that looks like it might actually save customers money on licenses.
Spring happens pretty quickly in North Carolina; it arrives overnight and is over in a month. The speed at which everything bursts into life is incredible. So, yet again I’m a little late updating this blog’s header image.
Mainly for my own purposes – the images I use for the header are in this Fickr Set. The Spring image is a close up of a Japanese Maple in our front garden waking up after Winter.
See also Autumn and Winter (I never got around to Summer last year – this year maybe).
Unsurprisingly and from what I’ve seen personally – tech. conference attendance is a little light this year. But if you have some budget for attending tech. conferences – I think the combined JBoss World / Red Hat Summit (Chicago, Sept 1st-4th) could be just about the best investment you make this year.
You’ll learn about all the great tech. that Red Hat and JBoss will be shipping as well as some of the technology still in the labs. But most of all you’ll learn how Red Hat can save you and your organization money – and right now that’s got to be a smart investment.
* travel and accomodation extra
Microsoft have finally figured out that Metcalfe’s Law applies to them as much as the next software company – despite their huge footprint. To quote Microsoft’s CEO and CMM (Chief Mad-Monkey) Steve Balmer :
“In a more connected, services-oriented world…one of the greatest value-adds in some sense is what people do on the other end of the wire”
Bang-on Steve – couldn’t have put it better myself. Let’s see how wide the Kimono opens before Balmer get’s shy. Ick – that’s a poor choice of metaphor – sorry if I’ve spoiled your lunch.
I have FileVault enabled on my MBP thinking it was a responsible way to protect work-related proprietary information from falling into the wrong hands; turns out it’s actually quite easy (for a dedicated hacker) to crack the password / key according the this CNET article. Some pretty interesting ideas about salvaging information from memory. Hopefuly this work will help Apple improve FileVault.
Over the last day or so, I’ve been playing with VirtualBox – a type-2 desktop-oriented hypervizor; I managed to get my two favourite Linux flavours up and running pretty quickly now I’m contemplating mucking about with the networking so I can get the images talking over a virtual network.
Once I have that – I have a pretty decent developer sandbox – something I wish I had 7 or 8 years ago when I was still a developer. Still – should be a pretty useful setup for tinkering on home projects.
VirtualBox is pretty slick – so far – no issues – I just works – which is the way software should be. One thing I’m still looking for is a way to run windows (small W) outside the visual sandbox; I find having a bunch of windows; running in windows a bit limiting and doesn’t allow me to use my (multi)-screen real estate effectively.
Next (assuming I find the time) is to try VirtualBox on my MBP – I’m missing Ubuntu.
