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.