Rob Gingell, Sun's chief engineer, has left to join Bill Coleman's Cassatt Corp. Cassatt is an enterprise infrastructure software and services company focusing on helping enterprises scale out their commodity hardware systems by implementing clustering, grid-like features. Rob will join former Sun heavyweights such as Rich Green.

What does this mean for open source Java?

Perhaps Gingell's departure from Sun will be most evident in any further discussion regarding open-sourcing the Java platform, for it was Gingell whom IBM approached with the notion earlier this year. ADVERTISEMENT

Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging technology and an IBM fellow, wrote a letter to Gingell in February asking if Sun would like to join IBM in building an open-source implementation of Java. Though Gingell sounded out the notion and even participated in a panel debate on the subject at this year's JavaOne conference, the issue seemed somewhat moot as Sun CEO Scott McNealy never seemed very keen on the idea.

PointerRead more here on the panel debate about an open Java.

Gingell also was instrumental in working out a harmonious relationship between Sun and open-source organizations and leaders. He helped smooth out a relationship between Sun, the JCP and the Apache Foundation, and made way for simpler licensing terms for open-source users.

Read more: Sun, Gingell Part Company

What is McNealy's vision for Sun and/or Java going forward? The company hitches back and forth from strategy to strategy trying to find something that works or even makes sense. Where they heck are they trying to go?

IMO, Sun should concentrate on tools (developer applications) and their desktop solutions. There are a lot of good ideas within J2EE, but without tools, it's hard for most developers to quickly adapt to new ways of doing things. I would like to see more products like Studio Creator come out from Sun. Yes, existing developers will be slow to adapt, but new developers/companies will quickly migrate towards tool-solutions for development ease.

IMO, Sun should concentrate on tools (developer applications) and their desktop solutions. There are a lot of good ideas within J2EE, but without tools, it's hard for most developers to quickly adapt to new ways of doing things. I would like to see more products like Studio Creator come out from Sun. Yes, existing developers will be slow to adapt, but new developers/companies will quickly migrate towards tool-solutions for development ease.

Several things come to mind straight away:

(1) In respect of tools, I think it would be difficult for SUN to forge too much of a lead here and they have to compete with the likes of Eclipse. It might make some money but not the kind of money SUN needs to make.

(2) SUN has made it's money with innovation - I think half the reason they have the problems they do right now is because they stopped innovating and became (at least for a while) not much more than a server/OS provider which put them right in the way of Linux etc.

(3) SUN still haven't figured out the best way to make money from Java. After all, a lot of the stuff that comes with Java is free (or extremely cheap) and the value add stuff like Application Servers and so on are verticals dominated by other companies who only focus on that vertical.

All the above are causing SUN to race around looking for a successful strategy, so one time it's X and within a few months it's Y. Most times, their strategy is much the same as established players and they haven't got the muscle to overtake those other players. Personally, I've got my fingers crossed that, they'll find a new innovation and then I think we'll see their strategy come together.

My two cents.........

Why the hell TSS cares who leaves and joins the SUN. Aren't people coming and leaving IBM ,MS, HP etc. I bilieve TSS should concentrate more on technology than politics, and if they don't have any thing better to do then close this portal, and we all will move on to some other forums...

Jilani, If you dont want the news dont read it. How is it so bad for you comment TSS to close the portal. U dont like dont read.

Makes sense,I log on to TSS to read about emerging technologies and new views about Enterprise java, not for reading grapevine and spins !

Why the hell TSS cares who leaves and joins the SUN. Aren't people coming and leaving IBM ,MS, HP etc. I bilieve TSS should concentrate more on technology than politics, and if they don't have any thing better to do then close this portal, and we all will move on to some other forums...

The reason that you see posts like this, is that we feel that these things matter. Why? Because they can affect us.

If someone like this who was behind open source Java leaves, then it can affect us.

If all of IBMs top enterprise architects went to Microsoft... it affects us.

Dion

ps. I do understand that you are not into every news item we post.

You saw the title of this article but you still read it. Why? This site is like TV (cable anyway), if you don't like the channel (site), don't read it. And, like TV, if enought people don't watch a channel they change the content. I like reading about the technology and the gossip.

-Pete

You saw the title of this article but you still read it. Why? This site is like TV (cable anyway), if you don't like the channel (site), don't read it. And, like TV, if enought people don't watch a channel they change the content. I like reading about the technology and the gossip.-Pete

Doh! There's porn in TV as well, so by your "logic" it would be OK to have porn industry news here also. After all, if you don't like them you don't have to read them, alright? And _I_ like reading about porn (ok, watching mainly).

Sheesh....

Doh! There's porn in TV as well, so by your "logic" it would be OK to have porn industry news here also. After all, if you don't like them you don't have to read them, alright?

Dont insult urself by posting such lame arguments!!!

I'm sorry, but i can't agree with Floyd on this one. Yes,it's a forum. But this is a technology forum, i thought. This isn't a place for discussing non-technical issues (and i believe X leaving a company Y is one such example) . This is not a place for gossip. This is no slashdot (supposedly a pure "geek" forum) where people aimlessly flame one another & waste time forcing opinions. And talking of forums, have you heard of such "news" being discussed on forum.java.sun.com? Even that's a forum, isn't it? Let's get the definitions right, Floyd. TSS is either a tech discussion site or a news 'n' gossip chat room. Choose your pick.

isnt it simpler for u to move on to some other forum rather than wanting TSS to close down. u dont like an article, its ur problem, not TSS's.

Why the hell TSS cares who leaves and joins the SUN. Aren't people coming and leaving IBM ,MS, HP etc. I bilieve TSS should concentrate more on technology than politics, and if they don't have any thing better to do then close this portal, and we all will move on to some other forums...

I have no idea who Rob Gingell is so I have no opinion on the original question but I would like to point out that the quality of the content on TSS would improve if the editors would actually perform their job title and edit out nonsensical things like "ADVERTISEMENT" from the posted content.

Picking nits,
mike

Just because people leave a company doesn't mean things are going badly. Look at the other side, there's a lot of opportunity out there, especially in the grid space (no pun intended). People like Gingell et al are entrepreneurs, they leave because they see an opportunity that simply can't be executed by large company like Sun. Large companies just don't do these niche architectures. Looking at Cassatt, it looks like a seriously interesting company, the fact that Sun are very much behind grid simply means that Sun are in fact going in the right direction. Essentially we have a new technology boom, not in the same scale as .com but grid is starting to appear all over the place. Without people like Gingell working on these technologies the market will not be there, if there's no market Sun don't make any money.

Take another example, Vern Brownell left Goldman Sachs where he was CTO to set up a new company Egenera, Blade based compute farms. Imagine the salary+bonus he must have got at GS, he still left to set up Egenera, it's simply more fun for an entrepreneur, nothing to do with Goldmans.

My take on this is that it fortifies the movement towards Grid and is potentially good news for Sun

-John-

There is nothing as disappointing as seeing a bunch of these stupid "Joe Blow is leaving XXX inc" articles listed on theserverside main page. I agree with the previous poster that they just clutter up the listings. I also don't care if it is Sun, IBM, HP, BEA or whatever....

I only clicked on this link, so that I could register a complaint and add another voice to the previous person who was also complaining about this.

I have to disagree with your opinion. IT does not exist
in a vacuum. External factors do affect us.

From what Dion said, Gingell seems to be influential in
Sun's role in open-source. As such, his departure is
news-worthy. At the very least, it gives some of us a
warning that there may be changes coming. This is
helpful in planning.

Norman and all the gossip haters,

TheServerSide is an Enterprise Java Community. Community means more than the technology, it means the people too, the business, and all the forces have an affect on this thing called Enterprise Java. If the news here on TSS were just 'xyz spec released' and such then we would not be doing our jobs in bringing you all the news of importance to the Enterprise Java community.

Floyd
Founder of TSS

TSS has not gone wrong in publishing who leaves what company especially as these companies are involved in shaping the future of java. It is not fair for people to say close the portal down simply because the TSS are doing what they are supposed to do as a community portal.

Anybody has got the choice to choose what he/she wants to read and if you are not interested in such articles then ignore it.