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Oracle refuses to talk about Free Java campaign
James Gosling's Java independence movement played down at OpenWorld
By Paul Krill | InfoWorld | Published 10:30, 22 September 10
While Java founder James Gosling has campaigned for Oracle to place Java under the jurisdiction of an independent foundation, Oracle is declining to comment at all on the notion. Asked about Gosling's efforts during a press question-and-answer session at the Oracle OpenWorldo, Thomas Kurian, executive vice president of product development, simply declined to comment.
"I will not talk about that," Kurian said.
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Gosling has sought to hold Oracle's feet to the fire on an effort the company supported in 2007 to have the Java Community Process become an independent, vendor-neutral standards organisation. That was before Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, which had jurisdiction over Java at the time. Oracle completed its Sun acquisition in January.
Kurian did, however, clarify Oracle's position on the fate of JavaFX Mobile, the mobile device variant of the JavaFX rich Internet application platform founded by Sun. An Oracle official described JavaFX Mobile as being on hold Monday, but Kurian said JavaFX Mobile will not run on the CLDC (Connected Limited Device Configuration) lightweight Java Virtual Machine, but will run on other virtual machines.
Kurian touted Java capabilities and ambitions for mobile devices, stressing there are 31 times more Java-enabled mobile phones shipping every year than Apple iPhone and Google Android combined. "I would not underestimate our capability [of] delivering a new Java platform" in this space, Kurian said.
Kurian also pledged continued support of the NetBeans open source IDE Oracle inherited from Sun.
Also, John Fowler, Oracle executive vice president of systems, said the final version of the Solaris 11 Unix OS is due next year. Oracle's Cloud Office collaborative application suite, meanwhile, is nearing a milestone. The suite is for the web and mobile devices. "We're right on the edge of having a preview for it," said Edward Screven, Oracle chief corporate architect.
