James Governor, principal analyst, Red Monk
"I think the Java community has failed to understand a few things and got it wrong in many ways in recent times. I mean this specifically in terms of the way they have been worried about Oracle which, as a company, has the potential to help improve Java in many ways now.
"Sun is in an interesting position where they are being blamed for everything, and I think this is sad, to be honest. For a start, why complain about the situation in hand now? If anything, wait for a year of Java stewardship under Oracle, so that you have some developments to actually comment on. Oracle may help streamline and massively improve the Java Community Process — we just don't know what is going to happen yet.
"The Java community costs a lot of money, and Sun has spent billions of dollars trying to support it. Oracle won't support it in quite the same way and will in all likelihood take a more pragmatic commercial hard line to the way it positions the technology.
"If you look back over the last decade or so, Sun had huge streams of money coming in from its workstation sales and latterly from its high-end server products — and a lot of this money went into supporting Java. Instead of complaining, almost everybody here at this show has made a lot of money out of Java, so I feel that they should be saying 'thank you' to Sun this week."
