Project Blackbox and Open-Source Java

Project Blackbox, Sun's scheme to right-size and stealth-colorize the datacenter, has a design je ne sais quoi-ness about it that is almost, dare I say, Jonathan Ive-ian in conception. With a soupçon of longshoreman chic.

I mean really, don't you want to put one of these things on your garage roof or on the edge of the patio to counterbalance the pool house?

The gallery of imaginative Blackbox deployments caused some skeptics to raise issues of security and energy efficiency. Like, if Sun is all into data security and energy efficiency and like that, should you be painting this thing black and putting it outdoors where it can soak up rays and get hauled off on a flatbed in the middle of the night?

"They could also steal the Mona Lisa," Schwartz says, illustrating the point with a (stolen?) photo of the Mona Lisa, "So don't leave a million dollar datacenter in an unguarded parking lot."

And the black color was just for drama, he says. Apparently Henry Ford was wrong; you can standardize without restricting all choice. (But who knew that GM embraced Java that long ago?) So Project Blackbox could evolve into Project Fruitbox.

Rich Green has predicted that all of Java SE and all of Java ME will opensourced by the end of Q1 07. Dates for JavaOne: May 8-11, 2007. So it'll all be done by then. And that'll be a very interesting conference if it isn't.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 04:29 PM  Permalink