Sun is treating their Alumni too well these days. I got to sit on row seven out of sixty thousand (or whatever row is at the far end of the insanely large general session hall). Alumni like me pay less than people coming for the first time, so I'd be pissed to be shuffled to row 43,000.
Various tidbits picked up from the first keynote:
- Are Sun giving away free Niagara boxes? I was a bit confused there. If so, then I just need a rack to put it in.
- The JCP currently has 1052 members, of which I am a proud one.
- There has previously been reported that Sun has made some changes to the Java re-distribution licenses so that there should no longer be any problems shipping a JRE (or a JDK?) with all Linux distributions. The main Ubuntu guy was on stage confirming this. Perhaps I should dump SUSE for Ubuntu? Seems like a safer open source bet.
- JBoss is joining NetBeans. It now remains to be seen if it matters, really. These vague announcements don't really mean much unless until we see shipped code and tools.
- Java will be made open source! It just remains to be decided how. I hope they do the right thing. Actually, I think this was the most important announcement from this keynote.
- They've had 280,000 downloads of GlassFish.
- Sun Java Studio Creator will be made open source. Not sure it really matters, since such a tool needs a strong vision to be good. Well, we'll see.
- They get about 12,000 downloads of Mustang every month. Pretty much, I think, considering it is still in beta.
