October 25, 2010, 6:44 PM — A developer Java gurus call a Java Guru has resigned from Java's governing body because, he said in a scathing exit letter, Oracle has replaced the community structure guiding Java development into a puppet government whose strings Oracle holds.
When Sun owned Java, Doug Lea wrote in a letter resigning from the Java Community Process Executive Committee, it allowed enough violations of the rules it had established to "foster innovation, quality and diversity independent of that from Sun," to be annoying and slow technical development.
Lea is chair of the computer science department at State University of New York Oswego, a specialist in concurrent data structures and object of a clear winner in the publish-or-perish curriculum vitae competition at SUNY.
Since Oracle bought Sun (and Java) and started using its influence against competitors Google and IBM, "I believe that the JCP is no longer a credible specification and standards body, and there is no remaining useful role for an independent advocate for the academic and research community on the EC," Lea charged.
He urged other developers to switch their efforts and allegiance to OpenJDK, the open-source version of Java that is the principle reference implementation for open-source versions of Java.
Kevin Fogarty writes about enterprise IT for ITworld. Follow him on Twitter @KevinFogarty.
