James Gosling, the Java pioneer who recently quit Oracle, said in a weekend blog post that he would continue to be involved with Java and that his resignation has been “a full-time job.”
Gosling left Oracle earlier this month, where he had briefly served as CTO of client software following Oracle’s absorption of Sun Microsystems via a $7.4 billion merger. Gosling was a longtime Sun official.
“Java is far from dead, its path has become complicated, but still vibrant. I’ll still be involved. Not sure how yet,” he said in his blog.
Gosling also said he has received “touching” comments on this blog as well as email, Facebook, and LinkedIn messages.
“I’ve spent an awful lot of time reading these messages and answering as many as I could,” he said. “Between all this and spending quality time with my lawyer, resigning has been a full-time job (before I quit, several friends said I’d need a lawyer because ‘this is Oracle we’re talking about’… sadly, they were right.)”
Gosling said he does not know what he is going to do next. “I didn’t leave Oracle because I had some next great thing to go to. I’m feeling pretty burned out and trashed, so the only thing I know for certain is that I’ll be taking some time off,” he said.
Gosling talked about the economy, which has made it tough to start a company in Silicon Valley because the traditional venture capital arrangement has “largely fallen apart.” But bootstrap funding can be workable for service and support businesses, common in the open source world, Gosling said.
“Given that a central pillar of Oracle’s acquisition methodology is making job offers that involve a (often significant) salary cut, there are lots of talented folks leaving and trying to figure out what to do next in their lives,” he said. “One significant positive impact looks like it’s going to be the creation of a whole pile of small businesses. It’s already happening, and I’m sure there will be a lot more.”
He said, though, he would be “having fun” instead of starting a company.
Comments on Gosling’s blog ranged from disappointment that Oracle had bought Sun to a suggestion that Gosling talk to Apple CEO Steve Jobs or go work on the Scala language.