14 DAY TRIAL // During the past week, Oracle has been silently firing all of its top Java evangelists, in a move that no industry expert is actually making any sense of.
May it be Java, JavaScript, Python, or Ruby, an evangelist is a top developer with extremely deep knowledge of a programming environment.
Every programming language has a few, and these are usually the guys that write books, speak at conferences, and generally act as the face of the programming language in the media.
When it comes to Java, most evangelists are in three places: the Spring open source community, Google, where Android is being developed, and Oracle, the company that bought Sun, where Java was invented and maintained for so many years.
Now, in a surprising move, just before their JavaOne conference, Oracle has started firing some of the people that were the face of Java itself.
This could mean that Java is mature enough to go on without evangelists
According to a series of rumors that started on Twitter and Reddit, most of the evangelists themselves have confirmed they have been fired.
The top four big names are Simon Ritter, Mark Heckler, Jim Weaver, and Cameron Purdy.
While the last one, Cameron Purdy, made a name for himself only in recent years via his concept of distributed caching, which was also adopted by many other programming environments, he was also brought in after Oracle acquired the company he worked at, Tangosol.
On the other hand, the first three names on the list are old Java veterans that have been around since the Sun days.
Nobody knows what this means in terms of Java's future, but Oracle has been seemingly treating Java more like a cash cow in its war with Google rather than a true programming environment.
Of course, there are people who will say that Java is now sufficiently mature to no longer need evangelists, but usually that also means that corporate suites are running the show, which is more than true when it comes to Oracle.
Since evangelists usually have big salaries and generally don't produce anything outside of a good reputation for your company, this could also explain why Oracle decided to put top brass talent on the market. Google's HR is definitely licking their chops right now.
Unsettling event at Oracle. All of the Java evangelists have been let go. Sad this happened to a great dedicated enthusiastic group
— kcpeppe (@kcpeppe) September 4, 2015
Everybody, @speakjava @mkheck @JavaFXpert are rock star evangelists and available for hire. Don’t miss this opportunity to grab them!
— Arun Gupta (@arungupta) September 3, 2015