Live data from Hacker News

James Gosling leaves Oracle

nighthacks.com

21–30 of 64 posts

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#23

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

No surprise? Java is pretty big stuff in the corporate world that Oracle operates in, and had to be part of why they bought Sun. You wonder just what they're doing to piss off people like this so much.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#24
post #15
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#25
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apart from seeing the beautiful elegant hardware running a second-rate port of a second-rate OS and the patents Sun owns ending up on being auctioned to patent trolls so they could have a field day destroying every competition for Windows without implying Microsoft, nothing. Apart from that, it would be a good thing.

Guys... Even if you disagree (and you don't want to debate the issue and prefer to down-vote the comment) with Windows being a second-rate OS and that a SPARC port would not be a priority for Microsoft, you you have to agree that having all those shiny patents covering all kinds of stuff being auctioned off to trolls would impact everybody.

Not me, at least directly, because I live in Brazil and we have no such software patent nonsense, but tech business would be quite impossible where they are valid.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#27
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Oh... You mean IBM-branded SPARC servers?

That would overlap with their POWER lineup. It's unlikely they would keep SPARC because it would eat away their POWER market share.

Don't know if it would, in the end, be bad for IBM, but the managers at the POWER side would pocket smaller bonuses. They would never let that happen.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#28
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#29
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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... which means the SPARC surviv…

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.

Re: James Gosling leaves Oracle

#30
post #26
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from seeing the beautiful elegant hardware running a second-rate port of a second-rate OS and the patents Sun owns ending up on being auctioned to patent trolls so they could have a field day destroying every competition for Windows without implying Microsoft, nothing. Apart from that, it would be a good thing.

Guys... Even if you disagree (and you don't want to debate the issue and prefer to down-vote the comment) with Windows being a second-rate OS and that a SPARC port would not be a priority for Microsoft, you you have to agree that having all those shiny patents covering all kinds of stuff being auctioned off to trolls would impact everybody. Not me, at least directly, because I live in Brazil and we have no such softw…

I doubt people are down-voting because of your views of the relative merits of this or that OS, but rather because the expression of those views is long on slogans and short on insight.
Post reply on HN