James Gosling and Rudy Giuliani

Scott McNealy’s lawyers were not businessmen, and his PR team seemed better suited to staging Bay Area homes for sale. They were useless.

One day I received a phone call from a Sun Microsystems lawyer. He said that “Java” in Java Developer’s Journal was a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems and that we could not use it in our magazine title. 

I thought, Fuck them. I went over to production and told Jim and Alex we were changing the next issue’s logo to JDJ. Problem solved. I told the production team that Scott’s lawyers could go fuck themselves.

I hate stupidity.

And this was very stupid.

The McNealy lawyer pissed me off so much that I went back to production and told the designers to announce the JDJ Edge Conference & Expo right on the cover of JDJ.

All our readers were already referring to Java Developer’s Journal as JDJ, PowerBuilder Developer’s Journal as PBDJ, ColdFusion Developer’s Journal as CFDJ, and so on.

We never got a phone call from Jeremy Allaire’s lawyers reminding us that ColdFusion was their trademark, or from Sybase telling us that PowerBuilder was theirs.

In fact, we published PBDJ—our first magazine—which we printed for two decades, and it became the foundation of a company that lasted more than twenty years, alongside twenty other titles we launched along the way.

Scott McNealy’s lawyers, who apparently had nothing better to do, decided to harass us. To hell with them.

***

Even though my events executives, Grisha Davida and Cathy Walters, were on top of their game, JDJ Edge became my personal baby.

We booked James Gosling—the creator of Java and a Sun Microsystems executive—as the opening keynote for our JDJ Edge event at the Javits Center in New York. What were those lawyers going to do—trademark Gosling’s photo too? Fire him? To hell with them.

***

Fast forward to seven days after 9/11. Like the rest of the world, we were trying to get our bearings. We had a show coming up at the Javits, but the convention center had been turned into a triage center for the World Trade Center disaster.

I asked Grisha to call Jack Buttine. Everyone bought their trade show insurance from him. He was a specialist in trade show insurance, exhibitor liability, and event-related coverage.

They assured us we were fully insured—against terrorism, acts of God, fire, earthquakes, anything.

What they didn’t realize was that our policy had been written with AIG, and Hank Greenberg was not the kind of insurance partner you could trust. I covered that in another chapter in sufficient detail.

***

There was no discussion of doing a trade show in New York City—or anywhere in the world—so soon after what we had just lived through.

We held a management meeting, decided to cancel the event, and began refunding the attendees who called in.

Then we received a phone call from Rudy Giuliani’s office.

The woman on the line explained that the city needed every bit of economic activity it could generate. The mayor was asking us not to cancel our event.

***

We rescheduled the venue to the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue. It became the only trade show held anywhere in the world during the year after 9/11.

There were no flights.

James Gosling flew from San Francisco to London, and from London to New York, just to deliver his opening keynote.