You'd almost think that his fifteen year tenure at Sun Microsystems was a bit of an anachronism by the way 'The Father of Java' has been jumping around from one employer to another. But it's true, James Gosling has jumped ship, landing on a new ship, one that makes little, tiny ships. 

"I've surprised myself and made another career change. I had a great time at Google, met lots of interesting people, but I met some folks outside doing something completely outrageous, and after much anguish decided to leave Google." -James Gosling's Blog

So, James has moved from the company that brought us a software program called Android, to a company named Liquid Robotics, that makes real-life androids. Well, perhaps they're not quite 'androids' in the truest sense of the word, but they are nifty little robots that use solar-power and energy harvested from the ocean's waves to sail around the globe collecting reams of information and data.

Apparently, this type of remote data collection is a billion dollar industry, and if Liquid Robotics can manage to perfect the onboard robotics embedded into their tiny little 'wave gliders', while figuring out how to collect, manage and interpolate all of the information that gets sent back to the data center, then a good chunk of that billion dollars could be theirs. "I'll be involved in both the onboard software - sensing, navigation and autonomy - and in the datacenter, dealing with the in-rush of data. The current systems work well, but they have a variety of issues that I look forward to working on." Says James Gosling on his nighthacks blog.

And of course, with James Gosling as their Chief Software Architect, there's no doubt that Liquid Robotics will successfully achieve their goals.

Not entirely surprising. In Gosling's shoes, I'd probably be doing the same. It's hard to really feel ownership in a massive company like Google unless you've been with it for an early initiative like Java at Sun...

Happy sailing James Gosling :-).

I think, from Google's perspective,  Andy Rubin is the new James Gosling!

I didn't have the patience to watch the 1 hr video at JavaLobby, and I'm too lazy to google, but here are my questions:

• Is there a built in shark repellant, so that it doesn't get mistaken for a seal?
• Can you track these in Google Latitude, so that you can tell the cops their exact whereabouts in case they get stolen by pirates or fishermen-dads who simply want to take them home for their kids to play with?

1) This thing is yellow, so it could only get mistaken for a yellow seal, which is highly unlikely.

2) Any pirate worth their salt would disable any tracking device once it was stolen, so you'd only be able to know where it was when it was stolen, which by time any police enforcement would be able to arrive, the pirates would be long gone.

If I see James at JavaOne, I'll do a follow-up on these questions to get more details.

Aparently, Yellow Seal or not, the sharks are still interested in eating them... check it out:

When Sharks Attack Robots

Google already has autonomous cars. If it wants autonomous sea vessels, it will have no problems buying Liquid Robotics too, and concomitantly reel Gosling back to mother ship.

Congrat's Mr. Gosling and best of luck for future.

Interesting that the careers posts jobs for C, C++, C#.