To be clear, Sun = FOSS. We have transformed our company and aligned it around the belief that giving away our technology and investing in related communities will create greater adoption of our intellectual property and ultimately redound to the benefit of our shareholders, customers and the open source community. When it comes to Sun's commitment to open source - "the horse is out of the barn". Not only that, it's also had foals.

Be careful where you step. The horse seems to have left other things around. As long as it can remain hidden behind Sun's NDA requirements and the FSF peeps continue to remain complacent, maybe you won't smell it either.

Hopefully they won't destroy Java in the process just to hit their numbers for a quarter or two.

I guess it's now "was the voice of". John, we'll miss you.

I've been meaning to announce that I've joined a new startup, 10gen. I'll write more about the change later. The upshot of 10gen should be well explained on the site (and if not, let me know so I can fix it), but in brief, we're developing a "platform" for what is very loosely called "cloud computing". I say "loosely", because the term encompasses a very broad range of technology and services, from basic grid computing to AWS to AppEngine to SalesForce to EngineYard to ... I'm working with some very smart and accomplished people (ignore the guy at the bottom of the page) and I'm lucky - we appear to all share the same views on code, agility, process, technology, product, etc.

What we're building is ambitious - an application server and a database that are designed for infinite scalability. In addition, we're building developer tooling, application libraries, and management infrastructure to help people develop, debug and deploy applications to said scalable application platform. A similar example is Google's AppEngine - it's an app server with a kind of database to which you can write applications, and those apps will run across the Google's resource grid. The 10gen platform is an app server with an object database (keep reading :), and this platform will run across a variety of resource grids - you can run it on Amazon's AWS, across standard managed hosting providers like Rackspace etc (even multiple ones, for geo and vendor diversity), or even run on your internal computing resources.

A key feature of our platform is that we're multi-language. We're focused on Javascript and Ruby at the moment for writing applications, but we have no religious or political convictions here - we're interested in supporting languages that people want to work on. (We are also dedicated to making such languages and related frameworks run fast.) The constraint is that we think that to get internet scalability, standard programming models have to change a little - you can't just toss a LAMP stack or Java EE server onto AWS and expect infinite scalability. While the benefits of AWS are clear - zero capex for infrastructure, dynamic resource availability, reduced operations personnel costs - you still have whatever scalability limitations you started with in your LAMP stack or Java EE server. Don't get me wrong - this isn't a ding on LAMP, EE, or AWS but just a recognition of the challenges we're all facing with our standard tools.

On the database side, yes Virginia, it's an object database. When I first heard this, I had what I imagine is the standard reaction by people that have only used RDBMSs - "huh?". But after playing with it, and thinking about the problem space, I'm convinced that this kind of database architecture is not only nice, but required. Clearly Google and Amazon think so too as their data stores are either object stores or tuple stores. Sure, you can run a RDBMS on at Amazon, but that's just as scalable as your current config. It's clear that an ODBMS isn't going to be the right database for all applications, but I think that what we have is very "fit for purpose", and the RDBMS isn't the right database for all applications either. (Think of how much time we all spend as programmers trying to deal with the RDBMS in a sane way via JPA, Hibernate, iBatis, JDO, Linq, ActiveRecord, ActiveTable, Django, SQLAlchemy, Storm, DataMapper, DataXtend, etc)

Anyway, we're looking for really good people to join the team. We're focused on hiring in our New York office on 20th Street in what is colloquially known as "Silicon Alley", but I'll consider other arrangements. We have some really big and interesting problems to solve, and we need people of all experience levels and backgrounds. The app server is written in Java, and the database in C++. There are all sorts of scalability, grid and management issues to solve. Our application libraries and frameworks are written in Java, Javascript and Ruby. We want to build tooling for Eclipse. We're going to be open sourcing major parts of our codebase. I need core appserver and db engineers, application library and framework engineers, Ruby and Ruby on Rails engineers, Eclipse plugin engineers, QA engineers, QA technicians, technical writers, community leaders and managers, developer relationship managers, etc. The list goes one. I could formally list the job specs, but I think that if you've read this far, our time would be better spent talking. Just drop me a mail at geir at 10gen dot com. If you have my phone number, call me.

This is an exhilarating, terrifying space with exhilarating, terrifying problems to solve, and we have an opportunity to make a real impact. Life is too short to be bored :)

But developing and maintaining a good TCK is a huge task, and one few open-source projects are accustomed to.

I think that Eclipse has 30k+ tests. Apache Harmony has a massive pile. GNU Classpath has something like 20k. There are tons in Apache Commons. Clearly it can be done. A TCK is really just a thorough (and if you've used them, not always so thorough) pile of unit tests :)

While I'm confident that Sun still has enough remaining technical chops to deliver the core technology - some of the smartest people I know work there, and work on this - I think that Sun needs to modify it's DNA and get people that not only understand how to market to the development and design community, but also create tooling for designers as Adobe (clearly) and Microsoft (to some degree) - the two companies that Sun has decided to take on, head on - have at least a decade head start on them. Hint I - this will require investing heavily now, rather than trying to limp by on the cheap. Hint II - another walled-garden OSS community ain't gonna cut it because the best OSS tooling are tools that developers built for themselves. (Eclipse, NetBeans (sorta), gcc, ant, etc...). Designers don't build these kinds of tools for themselves.

This reminds me - given the sheer number and quality of Java engineering defections (I've lost track of the world-class rockstars that are just at Google, let alone Azul, etc)... I worry about the effect this will have on Sun's ability to deliver the next rev of Java SE...

Patrick, Danny, Calinel :

Given that fact that the statements contained in

    http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2008/05/14/jcp_individual_representation/

are given by a Sun employee identifying himself in his job role, can I assume that Sun is interested in taking this discussion public? I think that is a really healthy approach. I think there is confusion about the basic facts and I think clarification will be useful for the community as a whole.

I think I'll wait to see what Sun's intention is here before addressing some of the problems in the article. After all, it could be a just a huge misunderstanding. Why do I care? Because openness, transparency and the equitable "rule of law" is inherent in the ASF's struggle in securing an equitable Java SE TCK license from Sun.

Hopefully Sun will allow me to publish their answer. Not being able to would be supportive of "A culture favoring closed-door meetings" :)

Read here

Also here : http://java.dzone.com/news/glassfish-v3-major-win-osgi

Nice evening last night. Dinner w/ Simon and Danese in North Beach. Found out that SF natives store their car keys in the trunk keyhole when at dinner. That wouldn't work in NYC. Hard to imagine why they bother locking them in the first place. Saw friends at OpenSolaris launch party (part 1) at Jillian's and then evening of debauchery w/ friends at HoS courtesy of RedMonk. Thanks guys, and apologies again for my tardiness, James.

I did the export of the schedule to .ics and imported to iCal. Worked like a charm. Only problem is that it only was my sessions, and not the general ones, like the general sessions, pavilion hours, lunch, coffee breaks, and after hours activities. Silly.

I also got to spend time with Ean Schuessler and his brother Eric, who also was here. When Bruno told me "Hey, Ean has a brother! He's bigger and crazier than Ean is!" I knew that things were going to be more interesting than usual. It was great meeting Eric. These two guys are insanely talented, and inspired at a level that is indescribable.

I have two photo's to share. The first comes from a restaurant we went to sat night, one that specialized in filet mignon, where "specialized" refers to the various ways they cook it. Start with "Chicken-Fried" :

Yes, there's a piece of steak in there - and not a bad one. (Forget the bed of pasta it's one...) That was followed by "filet mignon parmesian", then w/ garlic, then we a yellow-ish cheese, then a white-ish cheese, then madiera, and then something else I forgot. All good, but odd :)

Here's another pic from the gym at my current hotel - it's SP in the evening, clouds and rain :

Congrats, my friend!

Hey, can I get on the OpenJDK governing board? Would be good to have some loyal opposition on it :)