King of the geeks leaves Oracle

Oracle's chief technology officer James Gosling, inherited from the take over of Sun, is leaving the company.

In a cryptic blog post Gosling said: "The rumours are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd)." The blog is mostly down at the time of writing.

He 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."

He apologised to anyone who had gone to St Petersburg for the TechDay on Thursday expecting to see him, and said he really hated not being there.

Canadian-born Gosling joined Sun in 1984.

Gosling said he was moving all his old Sun blogs across, because he retained rights to them. But more recent entries "were written under somewhat more strict policies :-)".

The news cannot be a total surprise given the very different cultures of Sun and Oracle, but losing such a high profile figure is unlikely to cheer up Larry Ellison.

What is less certain is where this leaves the development of Java now that it's lost one of its loudest supporting voices.

Gosling did not reveal what his next job or project would be, but said he would take some time off before he began job hunting. ®