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YEARS ago at a conference I got really mad at Gosling and told him that Java was going to be Open Source one way or another and that they might as well Open Sou

YEARS ago at a conference I got really mad at Gosling and told him that Java was going to be Open Source one way or another and that they might as well Open Source it now and maybe SUN wouldn't implode. Well... I was right.

suyash 6y ago
Open JDK has been there since 2007, large part of Java tools and libraries are under open source license, JCP has been advocating open development since 1998 so I call this BS.
bluejekyll 6y ago
How would this have prevented Sun from “imploding”? Wasn’t Sun’s main issue that they were selling extremely expensive hardware and a proprietary OS that were completely overtaken by x86 and Linux? I remember getting to play with the very expensive hardware they’d handout to startups in the late 90’s and early 00’s. It was good hardware, but it wasn’t so much better than the slightly more buggy and much less costly Linux systems at the time.
- smart_jackal 6y ago
  Sun's main issue was that they failed to capitalize on all the wonderful tech they had including Java, VirtualBox and Openoffice/StarOffice. Even after open sourcing all of them, they could have kept the company running by marketing to enterprises and offering support. If they had learned these skills from companies like RH/SUSE/IBM, then Java would have been in much better hands today.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    First of all, Oracle and IBM have been part of Java world since the early days with their own Java implementations, and Oracle even jumped on Sun's boat regarding those Java based thin client workstations that were all the rage around 1998. Secondly, with Sun you would never had gotten AOT, because they saw it as something that 3rd party vendors like Oracle and IBM should care about, they were fully into "JIT or bust", and MaximeVM would have followed the same path as SPOTs, instead of turning into GraalVM.
- Twirrim 6y ago
  According to Larry Ellison, one of the biggest problems that Oracle discovered when they acquired Sun was that sales compensation was based solely on the value of the sale, with no requirement for the deal to make a profit. Their sales team had been merrily selling them to bankruptcy. [1] Geniuses with tech, but maybe not so good on the business side? https://www.barrons.com/articles/BL-TB-24039 https://www.barrons.com/articles/BL-TB-24039
  - tehlike 6y ago
    Reminds of the saying: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Also a good read: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
    - hassancf 6y ago
      Interesting. “But then there started to be curious sightings, all around town: Rats, alive and healthy, running around without their tails. It turned out the hunters would rather amputate a live animal’s tail than take a healthy rat, capable of breeding and creating so many more rats—with those valuable tails—out of commission. There were also reports that some Vietnamese were smuggling foreign rats into the city. And then the final straw: Health inspectors discovered, in the countryside on the outskirts of Hanoi, pop-up farming operations dedicated to breeding rats.”
  - slgeorge 6y ago
    I'm sorry but first the majority of software companies focus their sales compensation on the contract value (TCV) rather than the profitability. It's not generally the sales teams job to evaluate profitability, that the product/commercial teams job by setting out the lines of discount. The reason is that for most tech companies you want to maximise your market reach. More importantly, I wouldn't trust a word that Larry Ellison says - particularly when the primary purpose of the article was to boost the Oracle share price by explaining that Sun would be additive to that quarters profits. I'm not saying that Scott McNeally or Jonathan Schwartz were great execs - I have no idea - but I think you have to look at the goal of the article.
pjmlp 6y ago
Sun imploded because Google screwed them with the Android Java games, and then let the company sink, hoping no one would buy them. So if you have any problem with Oracle, thank Google in first place.
- killface 6y ago
  sun imploded for a lot of reasons, android games wasn't a huge factor. their ridiculously expensive hardware and consultants? much bigger.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I was doing UNIX/Windows cross platform development during the first .com wave. So I had to deal with Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, and Windows NT/2000. We also rented servers for in-house development. Their rates were just like everyone else on the Fortune 500 world.
- geofft 6y ago
  Didn't Sun open-source Java before Android launched (but after Android had already done a significant amount of implementation internally)? Looks like they open-sourced it in fall 2006. Android was founded in fall 2003 and acquired by Google in summer 2005, but I can't find any public references to it being Java-based from before 2007. Android is now using OpenJDK and (I assume) not paying anything to Oracle for it. I think they could theoretically have rebased on top of OpenJDK in early 2007 if they expected it to be a serious legal problem, and Sun would have been no better off.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    It was dual licensed, and JavaSE license did not apply to embedded devices deployment. Android is not using OpenJDK as such, that is Google's marketing. What Google is doing is cherry picking code from OpenJDK and adapting it to Android. What they care about is keeping Kotlin's FFI to Java libraries relevant. In Android 11 there are a couple of Java APIs all the way to 13, that they again cherry picked from. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/07/11-weeks-of-android-languages.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/07/11-weeks-o... It is quite easy to track from their Gerrit which stuff gets copied from OpenJDK and what keeps being ignored. They always end their Java update announcements asking for what APIs are relevant, while for anyone else it is clear that only 100% matters. And we aren't even getting into language features or JVM bytecodes that don't have parity with ART ones. Android Java is Google's J++. Also for selling Kotlin they always use Java 7/8 code style when comparing against Kotlin code.
bondolo 6y ago
Why would you argue that point with him? He always wanted Java (and Solaris) to be open source, it was the Sun execs who took more than a decade to finally agree.

suyash 6y ago

Open JDK has been there since 2007, large part of Java tools and libraries are under open source license, JCP has been advocating open development since 1998 so I call this BS.

bluejekyll 6y ago

How would this have prevented Sun from “imploding”? Wasn’t Sun’s main issue that they were selling extremely expensive hardware and a proprietary OS that were completely overtaken by x86 and Linux? I remember getting to play with the very expensive hardware they’d handout to startups in the late 90’s and early 00’s. It was good hardware, but it wasn’t so much better than the slightly more buggy and much less costly Linux systems at the time.

smart_jackal 6y ago
Sun's main issue was that they failed to capitalize on all the wonderful tech they had including Java, VirtualBox and Openoffice/StarOffice. Even after open sourcing all of them, they could have kept the company running by marketing to enterprises and offering support. If they had learned these skills from companies like RH/SUSE/IBM, then Java would have been in much better hands today.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  First of all, Oracle and IBM have been part of Java world since the early days with their own Java implementations, and Oracle even jumped on Sun's boat regarding those Java based thin client workstations that were all the rage around 1998. Secondly, with Sun you would never had gotten AOT, because they saw it as something that 3rd party vendors like Oracle and IBM should care about, they were fully into "JIT or bust", and MaximeVM would have followed the same path as SPOTs, instead of turning into GraalVM.
Twirrim 6y ago
According to Larry Ellison, one of the biggest problems that Oracle discovered when they acquired Sun was that sales compensation was based solely on the value of the sale, with no requirement for the deal to make a profit. Their sales team had been merrily selling them to bankruptcy. [1] Geniuses with tech, but maybe not so good on the business side? https://www.barrons.com/articles/BL-TB-24039 https://www.barrons.com/articles/BL-TB-24039
- tehlike 6y ago
  Reminds of the saying: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Also a good read: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-1902 https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hanoi-rat-massacre-190...
  - hassancf 6y ago
    Interesting. “But then there started to be curious sightings, all around town: Rats, alive and healthy, running around without their tails. It turned out the hunters would rather amputate a live animal’s tail than take a healthy rat, capable of breeding and creating so many more rats—with those valuable tails—out of commission. There were also reports that some Vietnamese were smuggling foreign rats into the city. And then the final straw: Health inspectors discovered, in the countryside on the outskirts of Hanoi, pop-up farming operations dedicated to breeding rats.”
- slgeorge 6y ago
  I'm sorry but first the majority of software companies focus their sales compensation on the contract value (TCV) rather than the profitability. It's not generally the sales teams job to evaluate profitability, that the product/commercial teams job by setting out the lines of discount. The reason is that for most tech companies you want to maximise your market reach. More importantly, I wouldn't trust a word that Larry Ellison says - particularly when the primary purpose of the article was to boost the Oracle share price by explaining that Sun would be additive to that quarters profits. I'm not saying that Scott McNeally or Jonathan Schwartz were great execs - I have no idea - but I think you have to look at the goal of the article.

pjmlp 6y ago

Sun imploded because Google screwed them with the Android Java games, and then let the company sink, hoping no one would buy them. So if you have any problem with Oracle, thank Google in first place.

killface 6y ago
sun imploded for a lot of reasons, android games wasn't a huge factor. their ridiculously expensive hardware and consultants? much bigger.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I was doing UNIX/Windows cross platform development during the first .com wave. So I had to deal with Solaris, Aix, HP-UX, and Windows NT/2000. We also rented servers for in-house development. Their rates were just like everyone else on the Fortune 500 world.
geofft 6y ago
Didn't Sun open-source Java before Android launched (but after Android had already done a significant amount of implementation internally)? Looks like they open-sourced it in fall 2006. Android was founded in fall 2003 and acquired by Google in summer 2005, but I can't find any public references to it being Java-based from before 2007. Android is now using OpenJDK and (I assume) not paying anything to Oracle for it. I think they could theoretically have rebased on top of OpenJDK in early 2007 if they expected it to be a serious legal problem, and Sun would have been no better off.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  It was dual licensed, and JavaSE license did not apply to embedded devices deployment. Android is not using OpenJDK as such, that is Google's marketing. What Google is doing is cherry picking code from OpenJDK and adapting it to Android. What they care about is keeping Kotlin's FFI to Java libraries relevant. In Android 11 there are a couple of Java APIs all the way to 13, that they again cherry picked from. https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/07/11-weeks-of-android-languages.html https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2020/07/11-weeks-o... It is quite easy to track from their Gerrit which stuff gets copied from OpenJDK and what keeps being ignored. They always end their Java update announcements asking for what APIs are relevant, while for anyone else it is clear that only 100% matters. And we aren't even getting into language features or JVM bytecodes that don't have parity with ART ones. Android Java is Google's J++. Also for selling Kotlin they always use Java 7/8 code style when comparing against Kotlin code.

bondolo 6y ago

Why would you argue that point with him? He always wanted Java (and Solaris) to be open source, it was the Sun execs who took more than a decade to finally agree.