With respect to the news this week – VMware Acquires SpringSource – I recalled a video with Rod Johnson, I recently saw. Rod Johnson talks about the future of Java innovation an Java in general, and to what extend will the deal between Oracle and SUN affect it. Don’t be bothered by the duration of the presentation, I recommend the first 25-30 minutes (unless you are a Spring fan and you want to see a demo of the response to Rails – Spring Roo). Overall I find the expose quite reasonable and meaningful, and I will try to briefly retell it, in case you don’t feel like watching it.
According to Rod Johnson, Oracle is quite a different company to SUN (and he is probably right). Oracle is not an innovative, but rather a successful company. And although those are not mutually exclusive definitions, there’s a difference. Larry Ellison demonstrated many times a desire to win and dominate – it is not a coincidence that one of the biographical books about Larry Ellison is titled “Everyone Else Must Fail”. The acquisition of SUN is hardly driven by a desire to invest in the development of the technologies SUN owns. It is most likely targeted at increasing the income through SUN products. Or in other words, the purchase has a lot more meaning to Wall Street, than to the community of Java professionals. And we can forget about the Java Community Process, the way we know it today.
Should the Java community be concerned, however? Most likely not. Thank God, SUN open sourced the Java virtual machine recently and this thing alone, in the light of the recent news, was very important. Not only that, but SUN is not the most influential Java innovator lately. Google, Apache and IBM have significant contribution and Oracle would hardly be an obstacle for this to continue. Rod Johnson also mentions the growing popularity of languages and technologies based on the Java virtual machine, which are not directly bound to Java. At the end, naturally for a keynote at SpringOne, Spring comes on stage. And the fact that Spring is much more popular and innovative Java technology, than the official Java EE.
And now ask yourself, in the context of the deal between VMware and SpringSource, does Rod Johnson believe that VMware are an innovative company, or are $420 millions too bigger stake, to rely on principles?