James Gosling

"In the summer of that year, about two years ago now, a friend of mine told me that because of his work in early development of Gosling Emacs, he had permission from Gosling in a message he had been sent to distribute his version of that. Gosling originally had set up his Emacs and distributed it free and gotten many people to help develop it, under the expectation based on Gosling's own words in his own manual that he was going to follow the same spirit that I started with the original Emacs. Then he stabbed everyone in the back by putting copyrights on it, making people promise not to redistribute it and then selling it to a software-house. My later dealings with him personally showed that he was every bit as cowardly and despicable as you would expect from that history. "

From Richard M. Stallman's lecture at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (Royal Institute of Technology) in Stocholm, Sweden. October 30, 1986
Copyright (C) 1987 Richard M. Stallman and Bjørn Remseth.

James Arthur Gosling was born on May 19, 1956 in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He received a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Calgary, Canada in 1977, and received his PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1983. His thesis was titled "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints".

He is best known for designing the Java programming language and implementing its original compiler and virtual machine. He also gained recognition for his Unix port of Emacs (sometimes refered to as Gosmacs) and his work on the NeWS window system. His JavaOne biography also says he has built satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of UNIX, several compilers, mail systems, window managers, a WYSIWYG text editor, and a constraint based drawing editor.

Gosling is currently a Vice President and Fellow at Sun Microsystems.