Last week at JavaOne, Jeff Gendender and a list of cohorts from basementcoders.com sat down with James Gosling at a coffee shop in San Francisco and recorded a highly informal and off-the-cuff interview in which they discussed everything from James’ university days in Calgary, Alberta to the future of Java at Oracle. The audio was recorded on a very simple handheld device, and the typical background noise you would expect to hear in any busy restaurant makes some parts of the interview difficult to discern, but regardless of the sound quality, the interview provides some great sound bites from James, and some compelling insights into the history and evolution of the Java platform.
Historical page metrics from this site demonstrate pretty effectively that TheServerSide.com readers remain pretty interested in what the “Father of Java” has to say, and with that in mind, TheServerSide was given exclusive permission to be the first to publish a few of the more interesting quotes that eluted from the conversation, while promising to publish a more complete transcript when time would permit. The transcription of the interview is now complete and can be read in its entirety at basementcoders.com.
Transcript of James Gosling Interview
Now some readers have questioned whether the content of the interview is anything more than mere gossip, or if perhaps the community is simply publishing a bunch of unflattering comments from a disgruntled ex-employee of Oracle. Given the fact that the quotes that get pulled out of an hour long interview tend to be the ones that are the most emotionally charged, it might be easy for one to get that impression, but when one really listens to the core of what is being said in the interview, the realization is that nothing could be further from the truth.
There is no doubt that James is unhappy with the current stewardship of Java, but he also remains optimistic that with a little bit of pressure from the Java community, Oracle will do the right thing and set up an independent Java foundation and essentially ‘free’ the platform. When listening to James talk about Java, it is clear that there really is a passion about the language, and his desire to see it flourish in the future goes far beyond any disagreements he may have had with Oracle’s corporate culture as they took over from where Sun Microsystems left off. “Everything I care about is in the JVM.”
The full transcript of the interview is now available at basementcoders.com. The interview itself was over an hour long, so the transcript is correspondingly verbose. But it’s a good read; one that incorporates insights from an industry insider about many of the issues that are at the tip of the tongues of those working in and around the Java platform.
Transcript of James Gosling Interview
Interesting Quotes from the Interview
The individuals who took part in the original interview include:
- Guillermo Castro
- Jeff Genender
- Justin Lee
- Craig Tataryn
- Jason Whaley
- Heath Kesler