No sign of Scott McNeally today, Sad... I loved his bravado and humor. I attended the
first JavaOne conference in 1996. It was like attending Woodstock. There was an incredible amount of excitement and anticipation for the platform and Scott set the tone for the week. Jonathon Schwartz is a sharp individual, but doesn't grip the room like Scott can. I know this sounds like superficial rumination, but can't help voicing my first impression of the keynote...
Anyway... on to some "real" information... This is the largest JavaOne ever, exact numbers have yet to be announced. The conference definitely feels much more crowded than last year, but it's hard to tell if there are significantly more people or that it is just due to the new requirement to register for a seat for sessions. Waiting to get in seemed silly. Event managers held up attendees while the previous session cleared. This led to long lines as people waved their RFID badges on the way in and get the green light to enter.
There is a definite push to get individuals involved in the JCP. This was repeated several times in several sessions. Maybe Sun hopes it'll feel more like open source if more individuals are involved in the JCP.
Motorola CEO Ed Zander arrived to push his cell phones and announce that Java is "the platform" for motorola's phones going forward. The industry will ship 1 billion Java devices this year with motorola shipping 2oo million of them. Ed also announced motorola's participation in the NetBeans project. In fact there were a number of announcements around new membership in the NetBeans develop community. Seem's that Sun has put a big push behind getting NetBeans viewed as a viable platform against Eclipse.
Changes in licensing were announced to allow Linux vendors to include Java as part of there distribution. In fact, shwartz stated that 60% of the PC's sold today include Java out of the box and Sun is pushing hard, working with PC vendors to include Java on their platforms.
One of Schwartz's first acts as CEO was to bring back Rich Green as Excutive Vice President of Software. Schwartz brought Green on stage and immediately asked the question.... "Are you going to open source Java?". Basically, after some banter, Green said It's not a question of When Java will be open sourced, it's a question of how."
