Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun, has left the company following its acquisition by Oracle. Reflecting on his nearly ten years at Sun in a posting on his personal blog, Phipps feels he achieved some "amazing things", including the releasing of code for Unix, Java, elements of Linux and the SPARC chip under free licenses. Phipps is also proud of the part he has played in guiding the Open Document Format at Sun and his role in kick starting Sun's blogging culture. He pays credit to the people he worked with in pushing forward those ideas within Sun.

Phipps has had disappointments though; he wanted to see Apache get the Java TCK licence that they wanted, an issue which has led to constant friction within the Java Community Process, and he didn't manage to get code for some projects "permanently outside the Sun firewall". Overall though, Phipps says he is "amazed and humbled to see what the open source team at Sun has achieved". Phipps has not made a decision on what he will do next, but will be keeping people informed through his Wild Webmink blog.

Phipps joins a number of former Sun employees who have left since the acquisition by Oracle. Tim Bray, SGML and XML expert, left on March 1st, and a number of the Drizzle developers, but apparently not including lead developer Brian Akers, have moved to RackSpace Cloud.