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The Present and Future of Open Source James Gosling Shares His Views For James Gosling, the important thing about open source is community engagement. At least that's what he told Tim Scannell in an interview for InternetNews.com. "A lot of our customers and the people we work with are just really smart and really good people," he continued. Gosling was careful to position Sun as a "supplier to other technology companies," which puts the corporation squarely in the business of supplying the infrastructure that underlies numerous applications developed by others. When it comes to web-based applications, Gosling characterized some of them as "chat rooms on steroids," meaning that the interest a developer might have in a specific project has largely to do with its nature. Workforce scheduling applications were one area where Gosling said the opportunity for collaborative application development was promising. Curiously, the "Father of Java" referred to the U.S. as a "third-world country" in terms of what he calls the mindset around networking, where Asia is the clear leader in this area. Even with open systems, the U.S. loses out to Europe, where the pace of the user community in solving its own problems exceeds that effort in this country. As an example of where this turn of events has left the U.S., Gosling cites the cell phone infrastructure. As a result of what he calls competing ourselves to death, we have wound up with several mediocre cell phone infrastructures instead of a single really good one. He attributes Europe's lead in this sphere to government regulation. Scannell wanted to know what effect a decentralized architecture might have on manageability and security, and Gosling replied that, as network bandwidth grows, centralization makes more sense. Gosling ties improvements in networking technology to another development as well, in this case, software as a service, which he predicts will become an easier sell when networks improve. Software is best thought of as an "ecology," Gosling asserted, attributing some of the impetus for this change to the collaborative efforts that have gone into Java over the past few years. The problems with software are not technological problems, he maintained, but rather business problems. Turning to his impression of Google, Gosling expressed some disappointment that, as he put it, "the killer app for the Internet is turning out to be advertising," which he sees as Google's chief business. In fact, he reduces Google's efforts to "just a scam to sell advertising."
In Sun's case, Gosling likens the company's contribution as being similar to clay that customers mold into whatever technology is their corporate focus. Summing up he said, "We're definitely a company that does deep subterranean plumbing. A lot of our intellectual property and a lot of our skills sets, and the way our sales force is built, is based on doing this kind of subterranean technology."
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The problems with software are not technological problems but rather business problems.
The Present and Future of Open Source
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