NewsTim Bray Joins Google

Tim Bray Joins Google

Developer.com content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.

On his blog today, Tim Bray, the 55-year-old software developer and entrepreneur, proclaimed that he now works for Google.

Bray’s a Canadian. Back in the mid to late 1990s he helped nail down the XML and XML namespace specifications. Until Feb. 26, 2010, Bray had been working at Sun Microsystems, but he declined an offer by Oracle to stay with the company.

“I’ll maybe tell the story,” Bray blogged about the Oracle offer, “when I can think about it without getting that weird spiking-blood-pressure sensation in my eyeballs.”

Now Bray is a “Developer Advocate” at Google focusing on the open source Android mobile operating system.

“The reason I’m here is mostly Android. Which seems to me about as unambiguously a good thing as the tangled wrinkly human texture of the Net can sustain just now,” he said.

Bray really, really wants Android to beat Apple’s iPhone.

“The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s 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.”

And despite Apple’s great iPhone hardware and software, Bray said, “I hate it.”

Get the Free Newsletter!

Subscribe to Developer Insider for top news, trends & analysis

Latest Posts

Related Stories