Gosling goes away from Oracle

BANGALORE, INDIA: Following CEO Jonathan Schwartz, and XML co-inventor Tim Bray, James Gosling, Father of Java, too has quit Oracle.

In his official blog, Gosling said, "As to why I left, it's difficult to answer: just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good."

Gosling, 54, is a popular and respected computer scientist and, to many, an icon of the free-spirited early days of Silicon Valley. The bearded, long-haired Gosling favors T-shirts and jeans and always seemed to enjoy himself at Sun’s annual Java One conference, at least during the traditional opening rite in which he and other Sun execs used giant sling shots to loft souvenir t-shirts into the crowd.

Gosling travels to India almost every year, and has made it a point to interact with Java enthusiasts and participate in as many Java-centric conferences and user group gatherings as he can.

Gosling was the chief technology officer for Oracle's client software group and, before that, the chief technology officer of Sun's developer products group.

His claim to fame began In 1991, where he led a small group of engineers in a project, then called Oak, to build an object-oriented programming language that would run on a virtual machine, which would allow programs to run on multiple platforms, such as television set-top boxes.

This work ultimately evolved into Java, which took off in conjunction with the growing use of the Internet, thanks also to its inclusion into the Netscape browser.

Gosling resigned on April 2 and has not yet taken a job elsewhere.