I most certainly hope that James Gosling was quoted out of context in this article. The way he talks about open-source is comes out very … Balmery, which is disturbing. Why is he talking about open source as a place where “any old person could check in stuff” - that is not the way it is done and he knows it. He should know it. Which is also why enterprise customers are not running away from well-kept open source projects like Linux and Tomcat.
Not doing the “open source is the one true path” dance, let me still be very clear:
- Server side Java would be nowhere near the size it has today were it not for the open source community.
- I care about being legally clean, and it is not a nightmare (Disclaimer - I live and work in Sweden.). Gosling joins Bill and Steve using the GPL to scare people, and it is just stupid. We all know not to use GPL’d code in our commercial products and it is such a relief then that the vast majority of the server side libraries are not licensed under the GPL.
This really made me upset in the “somebody I thought I knew did something really wrong”-way . For Gosling to come out with this blubbering, he really must be concerned over Harmony.