In a brief statement on his blog James Gosling has announced that he has joined Google.
I find myself starting employment at Google today. One of the toughest things about life is making choices. I had a hard time saying 'no' to a bunch of other excellent possibilities. I find it odd that this time I'm taking the road more traveled by, but it looks like interesting fun with huge leverage.
He doesn't reveal what he will be working on.
A number of Java luminaries from Sun have joined Google, notably Josh Bloch and Neal Gafter. Gafter worked on Google's Calendar before moving on to the .NET team at Microsoft, though he still remains active in the Java community. Bloch is currently Chief Java Architect at Google, having previously led the design and implementation of numerous Java platform features, including the Java Collections Framework, the java.math package and the assert mechanism.
Gosling has been critical of Google in the past in the context of Android, telling eWeek:
One of the reasons that we charge license fees is because we've got organizations of people that do compatibility testing and actual negotiating amongst the different handset makers so that things like GPS APIs look the same. And what's going on in the Android world is there's kind of no adult in charge. And all these handset manufacturers are doing whatever they damn well please. Which means that it's just going to be randomness. It could be let a thousand flowers bloom, but it also could be a dog's breakfast. And I guess having been around the track a few times, it feels like it's going to be more of a dog's breakfast.
In this context it is perhaps worth noting that one of Gosling's patents, RE38104, is one of several being used by Oracle in their patent infringement suit against Google over the Android operating system.
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Community comments
congratulations
by Jonathan Locke,
Re: congratulations
by Sasa Vender,
Re: congratulations
by Chris Shayan,
Re: congratulations
by Nikolay Tsankov,
Re: congratulations
by John Watters,
Re: congratulations
by Tao Lu,
Re: congratulations
by Cameron Purdy,
congrats
by Gerard Dragoi,
Re: congrats
by Winston Dhanraj,
Re: congrats
by Abhay Bakshi,
Noop ?
by Dominique De Vito,
congratulations
by Jonathan Locke,
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to james, but particularly to google.
Re: congratulations
by Sasa Vender,
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+1
Re: congratulations
by Chris Shayan,
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+1
congrats
by Gerard Dragoi,
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Google knows how to cherish values.
Real values. Period.
Re: congratulations
by Nikolay Tsankov,
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+1
Re: congrats
by Winston Dhanraj,
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+1
Noop ?
by Dominique De Vito,
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Hum, may be James is going to work on Noop...
Re: congratulations
by John Watters,
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+1
Re: congratulations
by Tao Lu,
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Yes. Companies like Oracle only give sales person enough respect. They will never understand why talented people leave them.
Re: congrats
by Abhay Bakshi,
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Ok, good comment. Now for a question: what values are talking about here? (read the question in a positive tone, do not misunderstand).
We need to know some examples of the values cherished by a good company like Google. Period.
Re: congratulations
by Cameron Purdy,
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First of all, great to see James back in action .. congratulations!
While I appreciate why the external view of Oracle is like that, the internal view is very different: Oracle has a very strong engineering and innovation culture -- just look at how Sun Labs has been retained as part of Oracle as just one example (I happen to sit in the middle of a bunch of Sun Labs people .. all continuing to do long-term R&D work). Look, there are always challenges to "getting things done" in a big company, but for a big company, Oracle is doing very well, and it does retain engineering talent far, far better than the industry average.
Peace,
Cameron Purdy | Oracle Coherence
coherence.oracle.com/