Sun co-founder Bill Joy is leaving the company after 21 years. Joy, the companys chief scientist, helped start Sun in 1982. The reason for Joys departure is not immediately known.
“For 21 years Ive enjoyed the opportunities for innovation provided to me at Sun, but I have decided the time is now right for me to move on to different challenges,” Joy said in a statement. Joys duties will be handled by Greg Papadopoulos, Suns chief technology officer.
“His legacy is broader than Sun,” Papadopoulos told eWEEK Senior Writer Darryl K. Taft in an exclusive interview. “Its really to the whole community of the Internet. So all of Bills contributions have been ones that made the way into the substrate of what we do—whether its things around the network file server, or adding TCP/IP to Unix and sockets was a pretty big step, to the network file systems, to his evangelism of Java, and kicking the chalk lines on new programming paradigms.
“I just think that hes been a tremendous person who helped get the Internet where it is.
“The fact is that over the past several years, his attention has really focused on what he considers to be the next wave of technology, which is not so much IT-based. Its a lot of stuff around nanotech, bioengineering, and thats where his heads been.”