James Gosling has left Oracle, saying it's time to move on... A whole lot of people have left Sun since the acquisition by Oracle was announced. Some of those people left Sun out of fear that their jobs would be eliminated (one supposedly expert financial analyst warned that 50% of Sun employees would lose their jobs -- that type of "news" will make people want to pack up and leave a company). Some were laid off between the announcement of the acquisition and its actual occurence. Others were laid off when the acquisition actually happened (though the percent of actual layoffs at that time should get that "expert" analyst fired)...
But, post-acquisition, we are still seeing quite a lot of former Sun people leaving Oracle. I did not expect to see this. But then again, I actually work for O'Reilly, and my relationship with Sun and Oracle is from a distance (even though they provide the financial backing for java.net).
In his post, James says:
As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good.
And he ends his "Time to move on" post with:
Sun's blogging policy gave bloggers rights to their own works. The few more recent blog entries that I did at blogs.sun.com were written under somewhat more strict policies :-)
I don't understand that. To me, the Sun and Oracle blogging policy differences look more like legalese that might fascinate lawyers, but which have little meaning or impact for the typical blogs.sun.com blogger. Of course, James was not a "typical" blogs.sun.com blogger.
James' departure has made me think a lot about Sun and Oracle today, their similarities and their differences. Back in the 1990s, I debated vociferously on the SiliconInvestor site with investors who knew the prices of Sun and Oracle and EMC stocks were destined to continue to rise by 500% every few years. My argument was that it was a methematical and economic impossibility for Sun's, Oracle's, and EMC's sales to continue to rise at a 30% annual rate indefinitely -- which seemed to be what was implied by their .com boom stock price rises. Where was the exponentially increasing customer base that would buy all that stuff indefinitely into the future? Such was my argument.
You can also look at the links under Archive at http://mathematicalanalysis.com/money/ to see what I thought of the .com boom as it unfolded. Suffice to say, I was not impressed.
So, why does this matter today? Well, it does, because prior to the .com crash, Sun and Oracle were almost two peas in a pod. Sun's and Oracle's leaders were great friends in the 1990s, united in taking on the behemoth from Redmond. Both companies appeared to have a brilliant future, looking ahead into the 21st Century.
But post-dot-com boom, Oracle had a strategy that worked in the marketplace, while Sun's strategy included complications that were out of sync with what was necessary to survive long-term in the post-crash economy. Both Sun and Oracle had wonderful people who had wonderful ideas and who produced remarkable innovation -- hence the enormous run-ups in their stock prices during the .com boom. But... in terms of strategic awareness of the realities of the marketplace, Oracle was clearly far beyond Sun.
So, why are DEC, Compaq, and HP in the title of this blog? Because I believe that Sun is very lucky compared with DEC. In my view, the survival of Sun's technologies and open source projects into the second decade of the 21st Century is due entirely to the fact that their leaders and Oracle's were such close friends in the 1990s. Had that not been the case, I think Sun might have ended up more like DEC -- which disappeared in 1998 into clone-PC maker Compaq! And, do we see anything of DEC technologies in Hewlett-Packard today? No! DEC is gone!
I don't want to sound like I'm dissing Sun. It was a great company. The data center where I work part-time was using Sun multi-processor SMP-capable servers when I started there in 1993. That was advanced technology then! And Sun servers (and an Oracle database) are the backbone of our present-day processing. Sun has always produced great, robust, reliable technology.
Unfortunately, while Sun was a great company, it was destined to die in the 21st Century marketplace. Some other companies that had similar market value in the late 1990s are still major players 10 years later, they knew how to make money post .com crash. For example, consider Hewlett-Packard. Like Oracle, they knew a bit more about business reality than Sun (or DEC, apparently, given HP's longevity).
The acquisition of Sun by Oracle is turning out to mean that Sun technology is definitely not gone. In fact, what's actually happening now is that Sun's most important technologies and open source projects are not merely surviving, they're thriving, through the extra support and resources that Oracle's much better understanding of the post-dot-com boom world have made possible.
Oracle is the enabler of a future for Sun's core technologies, in my opinion. Poor DEC never found such a beneficent enabler. Lucky Sun!
Yes, indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd). I apologize to everyone in St Petersburg who came to TechDays on Thursday expecting to hear from me. I really hated not being there. As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: Just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I've had the privilege to work with over the years. I don't know what I'm going to do next, other than take some time off...
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GlassFish has a modular architecture based upon OSGi and bundles Apache Felix as the OSGi runtime. TOTD #103 explains how to run GlassFish with two other OSGi runtimes (Equinox and Knopflerfish). However you may already have an OSGi runtime in your environment and like to run GlassFish within it. Sahoo blogged about how to embed GlassFish in Equinox...
A big part of my new job at Palm is education, in the form of tutorials, blogs, and of course speaking at conferences. Two new speaking engagements have recently come up. Palm Developer Day and OSCON...
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Eduardo Pelegri-Llopart announces: "The replays from our presentation on the
GlassFish Roadmap
are now available in different formats, including
SlideCast (Slides with synchronized audio)..."
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