Google hires XML developer Tim Bray

BEIJING, March 16 (Xinhuanet) -- Former Sun employee, Tim Bray has announced that he has joined Google and will be working on the firm's Android platform.

In a blog post, Bray excitedly announced his new position, explaining, "Google and I have been a plausible match for a long time. Web-centric, check. Search, check. Open-source, check. The list goes on."

While praising Google, Bray has wasted little time in pouring scorn on rival Apple. While acknowledging the hardware and software in Apple's iPhone was "great", he went on to describe the product as "sterile".

"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," Tim Bray declared. "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." Such sentiments echo those leveled against Apple recently by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which characterized Apple's behavior as that of "a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord."

Apple and Google have not been the best of friends in recent weeks and Bray's statement aren't likely to heal that rift. On March 2nd, Apple filed a lawsuit against HTC claiming that the company had violated 20 iPhone patents. The suit is widely seen as an effort to slow market adoption of mobile phones running Google's Android operating system.

"We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs in a statement at the time. "We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours." Google, who are not directly involved in the lawsuit, has nonetheless said that it stands behind its Android partners.

Beyond his criticism of Apple, Bray also made clear that he did not believe Google to be perfect either. Referring to the company's "Don't be evil" motto, he said that Google is "now too big to be purely good or in fact purely anything."

Bray will work from a remote position in his home town of Vancouver in the role of Developer Advocate to further develop the Android operating system. With the Apple iPhone selling 90,000 units per day and Android devices selling at a rate 60,000 units per day, "it's a horserace," Bray declared.

Android has great potential, Bray said, and he wanted to be a part of that development. "The mobile space has had a huge impact in the emerging economies of the less-developed world and I think that's just getting started. I want to be part of that story and Android seems like the right software platform for it."