Wednesday, April 11, 2007

JavaOne, OSGi, and Emacs

According to the advance publicity, there seems to be one session1 at this year's JavaOne conference devoted to OSGi and only a couple of others that refer to OSGi. Not a single mention of JSR 291, although I did try putting in a submission.

I noticed an interesting tidbit in the conference guide: "[James Gosling] has also built a WYSIWYG text editor; a constraint-based drawing editor; and a text editor called Emacs, for UNIX systems."

So did Gosling invent Emacs as well as Java? Well, no, he didn't. The truth is rather more interesting.

Richard Stallman wrote the first version of Emacs and Gosling produced a C version to run on UNIX. A twist is that a legal tussle over the Emacs source code provoked Stallman to write the first precursor of the GPL. Stallman has since endorsed Sun's use of the GPL for their OpenJDK project, so I guess he and Gosling are friends again.

1. TS-1419 "Best OSGi Practices" on Thursday May 10 1:30 PM - 2:30 PM

2 comments:

  1. Hi,
    I also think it is strange about there is no technical session or BOF about eRCP at this JavaOne??
    Strange? why?

    I wrote about it in my blog:
    http://ovenordstrom.blogspot.com/2007/03/ercp-and-nokia-e90.html
    http://ovenordstrom.blogspot.com/2007/03/onejava-or-nojava-or-twojava-for.html

    There are MANY MANY speaker from SUN!!
    Regards,
    Ove

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  2. JavaOne is Sun's conference, so they are free to choose the content. The platinum sponsors are different this year, which is also likely to make a difference.

    The rejection email for my submission came from Sun and the "JavaOne Conference Content Team", although I can't find the members of this team from the JavaOne site, so I can't tell whether it is a cross-section of sponsors and Java alumni or just a group of Sun employees.

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