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James Gosling: Yeah, I grew up in Calgary, I lived there until I was 22, then I went off to get a PhD in Pittsburgh in computer science, and I ended up with a Master's as well from CMU and did a wide variety of consulting jobs and then moved on to some bigger jobs. I eventually graduated in '83. Went to work for IBM which is, you know, is within the top 10 of my stupidist career decisions I've made (5:20) –

Moderator: So what excites you right now? What's out there right now that you look at and say, that's some cool stuff

James Gosling: There's a lot of cool stuff. I'm all over the map on what's cool. The project I've been helping out on is the control system for an Audi TTS, and that's just indescribable cool. In the enterprise space, things like Cassandra and Voldemort and some of the NoSQL database. I've never got it when it comes to SQL databases. It's like, why? Just give me a hash table and a shitload of RAM and I'm happy. And then you do something to deal with failures. And you look at the way things like the NoSQL movement is. It's various flavors of large scale distributed hash tables and trying to deal with massive scale and massive replication, and you can't back up the database because no tape farm is big enough. And you find scale and reliability can fit together at the same time. So a bunch of those things are really cool. (46:35) I'm actually pretty excited about the sort of pragmatic evolution of the open source movement that is happening. There's kind of a religious fanatic side that is just "Information just wants to be free." It's like look guys, I'm an engineer. I don't want to be an engineer as a hobby. I don't really care about being fabulously wealthy, but I do like to eat. Some of the Open source zealots, their view is kind of like you gotta be a waiter during the day and an actor at night. And it's like, no that doesn't work for me. 47:30 But there's this sort of pragmatic mode that goes, you know what's really valuable about open source is not what's free as in beer, but what's free as in speech. And then the collaborative development model - if you're going to collaborate, like companies collaborating in a non-open source way, the legal frameworks for them end up being nightmares, and if things go snarky, it is a nightmare. The standard open source program is one of the only ways to make collaboration work. But if you make it open source, how do you pay salaries. In the enterprise world its' been working out nicely, because service and support is where the money is. At Sun we had gotten open source on everything, because we came to realize that when you go 48:10 do a licensed software product, you get revenue from the license, but you've also got expense in selling. The marketing and all that stuff you do around selling is often pretty large. There's a lot of overhead in shmoozing customers. And those kind of cancel out.