James Gosling, the father of Java programming language, has quit Oracle Corp. There is no official statement from Oracle about the resignation of Gosling. However, James' cached blog does confirm his resignation, "Yes, "Indeed, the rumors are true: I resigned from Oracle a week ago (April 2nd)."
 
Gosling did not give any clear reason for his departure from Oracle. His cached blog does give clear hints that things were not as smooth as they appear on the surface. He wrote, "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 also apologized for his absence at the TechDays in St Petersburg. He did not give any indication about his future plans other than, "I don't know what I'm going to do next, other than take some time off before I start job hunting."
 
The Oracle site still has James Gosling listed under Oracle Executive Biography as "Senior Architect Advanced Java Development". The site says, "James Gosling is Senior Architect of Advanced Java Development. Before coming to Oracle in 2010, Mr. Gosling was a Vice President and Fellow at Sun, as well as the Chief Technology Officer of Sun's Client Software Group. Prior to that, he was the Chief Technology Officer of Sun's Developer Products Group. Mr. Gosling's accomplishments include building satellite data acquisition systems, a multiprocessor version of UNIX, several compilers, mail systems, and window managers. He has also built a WYSIWYG text editor, a constraint-based drawing editor, and a text editor called Emacs for UNIX systems. 
 
At Sun, his early role was as lead engineer of the NeWS window system. He did the original design of the Java programming language and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. He has been a contributor to the Real-Time Specification for Java, as well as a researcher at Sun labs, where his primary interest was software development tools. Mr. Gosling has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Calgary and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie-Mellon University, where he did his thesis on "The Algebraic Manipulation of Constraints." He is an Officer of the Order of Canada, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Science."

[Update: After this news posting by Katonda, Oracle has removed James' name from the site. Read: Oracle Indirectly Confirms James' Resignation]

Gosling is known as the inventor of the Java programming language in 1994. He created the original design of Java and implemented its original compiler and virtual machine. For this achievement he was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering. He has also made major contributions to several other software systems, such as NeWS and Gosling Emacs. He cowrote the "bundle" program, a utility thoroughly detailed in Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike's book The Unix Programming Environment. (Courtesy Wikipedia)
 
James' departure will add concern around the future of Open Source products/projects now owned by Oracle. Orcale now sits on some of the major Open Source products including OpenOffice and MySQL. Sun will reveal its strategy around the future of MySQL tomorrow.