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Ex-Sun man Bray takes on paranoid Android role at Google

Disses Apple iPhone's 'Disney-fied walled garden'

XML co-inventor and languages expert Tim Bray has taken a job at Google just a month after he left Sun Microsystems Oracle.

"As of this morning I work for Google. The title is 'Developer Advocate'. The focus is Android. Fun is expected," he wrote in a blog post titled "Now A No-Evil Zone".

Bray, who is among a growing list of Sun veterans to have jumped ship since Oracle bought the company earlier this year, didn't mince his words about his new anti-iPhone job with the Mountain View Chocolate Factory.

While liking Android's love-in with developers, particularly open source coders, Bray had less friendly comments to make about Apple's popular handset.

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.

I hate it.

I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient.

Bray said he wanted to prove Apple, and its closed approach to the internet, wrong.

But he didn't paint Google into a goody-two-shoes corner either.

"It's now too big to be purely good or in fact purely anything. I'm sure that tendrils of stupidity and evil are even now finding interstitial breeding grounds whence they will emerge to cause grief. And there are some Google initiatives that I feel no urge to go near."

Bray said he had no plans to get involved in social networking nor to ditch his love for Ruby now that he has taken on a job with Google.

The XML co-inventor, who joined Sun Microsystems in 2004, added that Oracle had asked Bray to stay on at the company.

"I'll maybe tell the story when I can think about it without getting that weird spiking-blood-pressure sensation in my eyeballs," he wrote. ®

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