Iconic Computer Scientist James Gosling Joins AWS

What for? That’s perhaps for another day, as although we do not know what exactly James Gosling will be working on, we do know that he has officially joined AWS as a distinguished engineer.

The legendary scientist is known as the ‘Father of Java’ in technology circles.

James Gosling came up with the original design of Java, and also implemented its first compiler and virtual machines while he was with Sun Microsystems. He left the company in 2010 after it was acquired by Oracle, and then spent a short time at Google.

His most recent work experience was at Liquid Robotics, where he was designing software for an underwater robot.

Both he, and an Amazon Web Services company representative confirmed that was joining the cloud giant. Though neither sources went into detail of the role he will be playing at the company. Gosling made the announcement in a Facebook post on Monday.

Interestingly, the technology pioneer ruffled a few feathers in Seattle last year, at the IP Expo, where he spoke about his fears of cloud vendor lock-in, echoing what many skeptic IT organizations feel about cloud providers like AWS:

“You get cloud providers like Amazon saying: ‘Take your applications and move them to the cloud.’ But as soon as you start using them you’re stuck in that particular cloud.”

That said, AWS has been investing heavily in tools for the Internet of Things, and someone like Gosling seems to be a natural fit for this.

He is not only intimately familiar with the process of deploying IoT systems, but also with the challenges that come when using the public cloud with Internet of Things implementations. Here’s hoping we get some more insights into what he plans on doing at AWS soon.