Oracle Sun loses James Gosling

THE CREATOR of the Java programming language, James Gosling has resigned from Oracle Sun and left the building.

Oracle said that it bought Sun for its software and Gosling has publicly said there was no doubt about Oracle's commitment to Java.

Gosling was serving the company as the chief technology officer for Oracle's client software group. He said that he has not got a job with any other company and is taking some time off before starting to look for another job.

The reasons for his move are not clear. In fact the only thing that Gosling has indicated that he has not been happy about is the growing politicisation of the Java Community Process. How much that has to do with the Oracle buyout he did not say.

Sun has also lost XML co-inventor Tim Bray, and of course also its CEO Jonathan Schwartz, since the company was taken over by Oracle.

According to his blog, which was mysteriously down this morning, 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. The hardest part is no longer being with all the great people I've had the privilege to work with over the years. I don't know what I'm going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting."

In other words, its about as cryptic as getting the "WARNING: Unhandled Exception thrown: class java.lang.NullPointerException" error in Java. µ