The Morning After

Well, that was quite a party. Herewith a few notes on communications, reactions, and names.

How to Tell the World · Here’s what we did:

• Over the last couple of weeks, we did literally dozens of NDA briefings with journalists and analysts. I lost count, but think my count was nine or ten.

• On the Sunday before, we had a teleconference for our bloggers, and unleashed them at the same time the press embargo lifted: 9:01PM Pacific on Sunday 12th (12 hours before the Monday-morning session).

• On the Monday morning, we had a live meeting at the Sun campus, with a Webcast.

• There was a press session right after the Webcast.

• We had an IRC get-together that we invited lots of tech bloggers to, and then the whole Classpath community showed up.

• We had a Second-Life press conference in the early afternoon.

I hit the “publish” button on Java Is Free precisely at 9:01. As a result, it got links from a few other early announcements, showed up on Reddit and TechMeme and TailRank, and had over 16,000 direct views by the end of Monday, plus ten or twenty thousand more via my Atom feed.

The IRC session was intense and, I hope, useful. There were so many threads going by so fast that I’m pretty sure we missed some good questions. I have to say, the love coming from the GNU/Java communities verges on the embarrassing, in particular Dalibor Topic’s throwing promiscuous IRC hugs left and right.

The Second Life thing, well, I don’t know. It was a lot of work to get going and it costs us real money, and then our pavilion can only hold 63 avatars, so the ROI seems questionable. It got nice write-ups from Taran Rampersad (who in Second Life is the cutest little penguin) and Jonathan Eunice. Absent the IRC confusion, the Q&A flow was much more linear.

Reactions · Most people seem pretty happy. IBM officially sniffed and grumbled because Java went GPL rather than Apache, but Bob Sutor was gracious and I’m pretty sure IBM will be present and constructive down the road.

The press coverage has been generally friendly, even the perpetually grumpy Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols allowing that it might not be too late. Given that SJV-N’s normal approach to Sun involves ripping out bleeding chunks of flesh, this is high praise indeed.

Simon Phipps has a nice roundup of early reactions, including some that—impressively—occur as code not words; way to go!

Microsoft maven Mary Jo Foley wonders what Redmond should do and polls her readers; I’m shattered to report that only 4% think that hiring me is their best bet.

*inj · James Snell is the first to point out that all the non-compatible forks of Java will have to have names ending in “INJ” for “is not Java”. He proposes TINJ for “This is not Java”, but the form is extensible: how about BINJ, HINJ, NINJ, SINJ, or WINJ? I’d go for Ninj myself, but time will tell.

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