James Gosling couldn't stand working for Larry Ellison, the notorious founder of Oracle. Ellison is casting an increasingly fearsome shadow over Silicon Vally these days, but Java inventor Gosling is freely proclaiming that the CEO screwed over his employees.

When NYU Ph.D. student Hubert (Hung-Hsien) Chang wasn't busy inventing Google or visiting Disneyland and signing up for Google-related groups on Facebook, he was coming up with lots of crazy ideas. Cross-platform programming language Java? Chang. Open-source office productivity software OpenOffice? Chang. The semantic Web? DHTML? Tim Berners-Lee Chang. All this and more he tossed away to finish his Ph.D. at NYU, which he finally accomplished in late 2002, as he explained in the video. Or 2003, as he explained on his archived homepage, below.

As part of Neil Young's appearance at Sun's JavaOne conference, groups of hacks were herded into a conference room to ask questions of the aging rock legend, presumably about how awesome Java is, but I think the plan is that Java is just awesome because Young says so, and he trotted out an expansive interactive discography powered by the Java functionality built into Sony's Blu-ray hardware and a clean car project with telemetrics powered by Sun-sponsored software. Because I doubt there's anything baby boomer executives and the formerly flannel-shirted Gen-X set they spawned like more than getting the most out of their cars and home theater systems. Except maybe hearing Young pontificate on the virtues of an all-analog recording process.

At the JavaOne keynote this held at the Moscone Center this morning, EVP of software Rich Green took the stage and told the assembled crowd, mostly developers, "Welcome to the revolution. Businesses used to drive technology adoption, but now it's all about consumers." Which suggests the company, known historically as an enterprise hardware and software provider, is changing focus to enable more consumer-focused applications. Not mentioned? Last week's announcement of a $34 million quarterly loss and a stock price that has hardly improved since plummeting 20 percent. But look everybody, Neil Young!

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz wrote a blog post to explain why the server hardware maker has changed its stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA, emphasizing its Java programming language and software suite. Luckily, he left comments enabled on the post, leading to gems like this: "This is a move right out of the Dilbert school of management." [Jonathan's Blog via Fake Steve]

• Sun promises to make Java open source. It will be the loss leader for a lovely set of Sun steak knives. [VNUnet]