Gosling on Java's future: "A viral body in a strange host"

If you haven't read Java creator James Gosling's two-part Interview with eWeek's Darryl Taft, you really ought to check it out. It's an intriguing look at what this epochal figure in the Java landscape think of the present and future of the language. Part 1 focuses on the current state of the language, and Gosling very much comes across as dedicated to Sun in particular's vision of how the language ought to work in the marketplace. I was most struck by his response to a question on what he thinks about Google's Android (I've added my emphasis):

The big attraction seems to be the zero on the price tag. But everybody I've talked to who is building an Android phone or whatever, they're all going in and they're just hacking on it. And so all these Android phones are going to be incompatible. One of the reasons that we charge license fees is because we've got organizations of people that do compatibility testing and actual negotiating amongst the different handset makers so that things like GPS APIs look the same. And what's going on in the Android world is there's kind of no adult in charge. And all these handset manufacturers are doing whatever they damn well please. Which means that it's just going to be randomness. It could be let a thousand flowers bloom, but it also could be a dog's breakfast. And I guess having been around the track a few times, it feels like it's going to be more of a dog's breakfast.

Here is a fairly robust defense of why Sun operates the way it does when it comes to charging its license fees, though surely this will not satisfy the purists. Since so much of Sun's Java income comes from mobile Java deals, one of his comments on the upcoming Java Store for mobile devices is also telling: "The cell phone stuff, we're probably not going to directly do it. That's the kind of thing we'd probably do in conjunction with the cell phone carriers." Presumably by "do in conjunction" he means "they'll want a cut."

And finally, when asked where the innovation in Java is going on today, he was unequivocal: his employer is still the epicenter. "It's all over the place inside Sun. People are doing cool things in any direction you want to look," citing GlassFish, OpenDS, and OpenJDK." If you expected to her Google or IBM or SpringSource's name brought up, forget it.

The second part of the interview is about Gosling and Sun's future, and it's much more circumspect, by necessity. As Gosling notes, Sun and Oracle can't actually talk that much -- either to the public or to each other -- about future plans until the deal officially closes, and to many questions, including on his own future with the new company, he gives an endearingly geeky answer: "No data." He won't be drawn out on speculation. He does say that he's glad, having once worked for IBM, he'd rather work for Oracle than work for IBM again; but he also acknowledges that Sun and Oracle cultures are quite different, and says that his current company will be "a viral body in a strange host." It will be interesting to see how the host responds.