my2cents

At the technical panel discucssion on Friday morning at Devoxx there was the interesting question “Does Oracle’s corporate culture stand in the way of success for Java?”. Even more interesting was the answer from either Brian Goetz or Mark Reinold (don’t remember), both big wings at Oracle…

“I think Java became a success despite Sun’s corporate culture. Priorities at Sun changed quite rapidly from time to time. At Oracle it takes longer to make a plan but then with stick with it” (something along the lines of that)

The two keynotes at Devoxx 2011 yesterday by Henrik Ståhl and Cameron Purdy from Oracle and today by Google’s Tim Bray couldn’t have been more different. If that is all Oracle’s got to bring to the table then I fear they’re in big trouble…

While Henrik Ståhl showed at least some passion and inspiration (neatly hidden underneath the Scandinavian cover) Cameron Purdy seemed to be nearly falling asleep himself flipping through his overloaded Oracle marketing slides. That he brought a colleague on stage who demonstrated the “cloud features” – gosh, how I hate this over-hyped cloud stuff – of the upcoming Glassfish 4.0 to him, instead of the audience, was seriously odd.

Tim Bray might be as high profile at Google Android as Ståhl/Purdy are at Oracle but there was pure passion pouring out of his mouth. Passion for software, passion for code, passion for improvement – and he spoke for himself and much less for Google*. He was vibrant and inspiring. Also, he was very humble and particularly respectful towards the Android competitors. Not a single rant or joke about iPhone or Windows Mobile 7 which he expects to catch up to Apple/Google pretty soon.

Tim Bray @Devoxx 2011:

1. “Information wants to be free.”
2. “The absence of women is the elephant in the living room. It must be discussed.” on the lack of women @Devoxx showing Banksy‘s famous red elephant photo
3. “If you are not working on mobile you are away from the action.”
4. “…wouldn’t you rather feed the poor, cloth the naked, cure the sick?” on why it’d be so much more important to develop apps for people in the third world rather than for us westerns who lead a lifestyle that lacks nothing (mobile Internet access dwarfs “cable-based” access particularly in underdeveloped countries)
5. “The importance of static type checking is proportional to the number of APIs your coding against, but inversely proportional to easyness of unit testing.” or so

* I’m neither an Android developer, and I don’t intend to become one, nor is it the mobile platform of my choice. I’m all Apple