May 18th, 2006
James Gosling on the state of Java
What would JavaOne be without an interview with James Gosling. I met up with Gosling, the father of Java and a Sun vice president and Fellow, at the Moscone Center to record this podcast. Gosling gave his take on why he doesn’t think Java needs to be open sourced, but accepts that it is going to happen. "The one big issue that we have that gets us kicked out of being called open source is the issues in our license around compatibility and testing," Gosling told me.
"From people in the open source community it’s really hard to get a coherent answer [as to why Java should be open sourced]," he said. He also mentioned the conflict of interest among big platform vendors (IBM?), who would like to dominate the Java space, which could hamper interoperability. "On one hand people say Microsoft–bad business model, I would never want to do that, but on other hand everybody would like to be Microsoft. There are so many players in the game, trying to balance all this stuff is very difficult," Gosling said.
We also discussed the progress in scripting languages working with Java and next steps for Java, which he said is a "late teenager." The diversity and integration of things on the network stood out most on his wish list, he said. He also talked about the cell phone as tomorrow’s desktop, singling out JSR 209, and the relationship between NetBeans and Eclipse.
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Stay tuned for coverage of the Gosling/McNealy keynote session tomorrow at JavaOne.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
