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Oracle loses XML co-inventor to Google

Ex-Sun XML envangelist Tim Bray starts with Google's Android team

One ex-Sun Microsystems employee who will not be cashing an Oracle paycheck is XML co-inventor Tim Bray, who has opted instead to work for the Google.

Bray will be working, beginning on Monday, as a developer-advocate for the company's Android development team, according to an announcement on his blog.

"I'd had an offer to stay with Oracle which I decided to decline; I'll maybe tell the story when I can think about it without getting that weird spiking-blood-pressure sensation in my eyeballs," Bray wrote. Bray was formerly the director of Web technologies for Sun.

Bray is perhaps best known as one of the creators of XML (Extensible Markup Language), an open-format marking up data so that it can be reused by multiple systems. The widely used XML subsequently served as the basis for most Web services protocols, as well as the massively popular RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Oracle traditionally has been an advocate of XML, using it as the lingua franca to allow the different components of its next-generation Fusion middleware to share information.

In the blog entry, Bray noted several reasons for moving to Google, most of them centered on Android. Bray said he admired for the Android project for being open source, for its application programming interfaces, and for the fact that it competes with Apple's iPhone.

"The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet's future" is "a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord's pleasure and fear his anger," Bray wrote.

Bray is not the only ex-Sun employee who is now blogging with frankness about the IT world. Sun CEO Jonathon Schwartz started a blog upon his departure of Sun, after the acquisition, as did chief open source officer Simon Phipps.

In January, Oracle closed its purchase of Sun Microsystems.

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