Roughly four years ago, XML co-inventor Tim Bray announced (in spectacular iPhone-hating fashion) that he had joined Google, mostly because of Android. He’s been serving as developer advocate.

Now, Bray has announced that he is leaving the company effective March 17th, for much less interesting reasons. He simply doesn’t want to move to California, and Google will no longer allow him to work remotely (he lives in Vancouver).

“I’ll miss the chance to use the Google fulcrum which, applied intelligently, has enough leverage to move the whole Internet,” he writes in a blog post. “Also, a lot of really cool people work there; I’ll miss them most. And the pay is good.”

He says he’s not mad at the company, and the separation is amicable. He says he doesn’t think Google is actually evil (now that he could say so if he wanted), though he adds that he knows “all sorts of non-public information” that he’s promised to keep non-public.

Bray doesn’t know what he’s going to do next.

“Beats me,” he writes. “Seriously, I haven’t figured that out. From a financial point of view I could just stop working, but that would be boring and unhealthy. On the other hand, spring’s almost here and summer’s around the corner, and I’d like to drink a little deeper of both than I have in recent years.”

He’ll still be traveling to the upcoming Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and IETF 89 in London to talk about what Google’s doing with OpenID Connect.

Via blearyeyed, Hacker News

Image via Wikimedia Commons