The Professional Service Delivery Experts

I'm on the way to the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM), first for the Open Source Initiative Board meeting and then to Germany on business. Lot's to do before I go. One of those thing that has been really neat is tracking a memory leak for a client.

About the most former topic, I'm really excited to finally meet some of the guys behind IcedTea, Kaffe and GNU ClassPath. In my mind, these are the future of innovation in the core of Java. Despite the "doom and gloom" in the press from Sun's layoffs, we've seen this before, Java will survive Sun and thrive. Sun's dying because selling expensive proprietary hardware is a dying business model. Even Apple has moved away from this (except for the expensive part). Sun has never been a software company and has never been good at making money off of software (unless it was a way of charging extra for a piece of hardware [i.e. Solaris]). Java didn't change this and nothing else is likely to. However, the Java Development Kit is the new Firefox. Sun will probably not implode quite like Netscape, too much of an install base and too big of a customer list (remember Netscape was a software company that wasn't good at making money off of Software). However, it will pare off the pieces it can't make money off of. What is needed now is to create the organization and stewardship to direct Java and keep "compatibility" at the core of the trademark (but not the technology/code as innovation happens in the forks).

I'm also excited to work with the folks at the Open Source Initiative. I've been too busy lately to springboard what I started with Alolita Sharma some months ago. We're working on a new education program to explain Open Source to new generations around the world. This is something that I think the open source community has done a really bad job of. Explaining the movement to the Facebook generation. I think the rot in Computer Science has disproportionately affected open source.

Finally, and this is how it is all related. The memory leak I'm tracking is for a client that uses Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This is a very fancy name for hosting + virtualization. The whole "cloud" bla in this case is a lot of marketing hype. What it is though is the death of low cost hosting companies like ThePlanet.com -- or at least the beginning of them offering better and more caring service. To debug the leak I'm using a recent JDK6 (older ones generate a lot of invalid heaps) and Eclipse Memory Analyzer (MAT).

Note that this whole HAT thing started AT Sun as someone's side project. However, the UI for HAT is not something you're going to like. Some guys at SAP come along and create MemoryAnalyzer and donate it to Eclipse. I'm sure there are a lot of other contributors along the way. Notice, however, that this cooperation and collaboration is made possible by open source and open source communities. This is the future strength of Java as a platform.

That said, Java as a language and as a syntax may be doomed. Partly because of Sun and the JCP committee. While the JCP did what it was supposed to, keep Java unified, compatible and under Sun's control, it's regime has hampered innovation and allowed a lot of silly things to go on a lot longer than they should. While it served as a forum to bring good ideas into the core and standardize them (JBoss et al with EJB3 and JPA), it also walled off some things and prevented others from collaborating. It also lead to the Factory that creates the Locator that creates the Factory that creates the Locator. We're seeing antidote to this in the open source community: Rhino, jyThon, jRuby. However, Java has in its favor a larger codebase and install-base. It may be years before any of those three have something as good as Hibernate, let alone competing implementations.

In conclusion:

• Off to FOSDEM, Hooray!
• Java will outlive Sun!
• I like Amazon's over-marketed hosting solution.
• Eclipse Memory Analyzer rocks!
• Java will outlive Sun (or Sun's control)
• Open Source can yield innovation through collaboration
• Java the language may die (but not real soon), but the platform will live on

Update: My flight was canceled and I had some other logistical issues so I'm going to see FOSDEM (on Friday) but miss the OSI Board meeting :-(. I'm hoping accomplish what I need to accomplish in informal meets afterwards.