James Gosling

James Gosling, Vice President and Sun Fellow, SunMicrosystems

Recently appointed to Sun Fellow, Gosling is the lead engineer and key architect behind Sun Microsystems' new JavaLanguage, a ProgrammingLanguage ideally suited to the Internet and DistributedComputing as it is platform-independent, secure, multi-threaded, compact, and ObjectOriented.

Gosling has been involved in distributed computing at Sun since his arrival in 1984. His first project was the NetworkExtensibleWindowSystem. Before joining Sun, he built a multiprocessor version of the UnixOperatingSystem; the original Andrew window system and tool kit; and several compilers and mail systems. He also built the original Unix 'Emacs', and helped build a satellite data acquisition system.

Gosling received his B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977 and his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983. Gosling's doctorate thesis was entitled "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints."

http://java.sun.com/people/jag/

RichardStallman on JamesGosling:

: [A] friend of mine told me that because of his work in early development of Gosling Emacs, he had permission from Gosling in a message he had been sent to distribute his version of that. Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling's own words in his own manual that he was going to follow the same spirit that I started with the original Emacs. Then he stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it and then selling it to a software-house. My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history.

from http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html.

Consider the source. It certainly says something about one of them, or both.

Well, it is a fairly accurate portrayal of the turn-around. I remember the early gosmacs versions being considered open (in some sense). He pulled the rug out from under a lot of people

I bet he got married and his wife started expecting the green-stuff. I can relate.

My experience with James is consistent with that of RMS. I believe that James was the route through which our work at ComponentSoftwareCorporation? became Java. He is certainly the person within Sun who could most effectively correct their public "history" of Java. -- TomStambaugh

JamesGoslingOnCollections

RMS and Gosling (and all the BigName Unix hackers) are all very... very.

Do you truly mean to lump all "BigName Unix hackers" into the same bucket?

No. But they are all exceptional for some reason or they wouldn't have big names.

That bucket must be, very... very... er. ...

[The New Jersey and CalBerkeley Unix crews don't consider MIT and CMU as sources of "BigName Unix hackers" :-) The term should rightfully be reserved for e.g. KenThompson, DennisRitchie, Johnson, BrianKernighan, BillJoy, McKusick, etc...]

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