James Gosling, Java creator, quits Oracle

In today's podcast: James Gosling, Java creator, quits Oracle; Adobe execs tells Apple to perform an anatomically impossible act; Ikea imposters scam 40,000 Facebook users.

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James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language, has resigned from Oracle, he announced in a blog entry on Friday. Gosling resigned on April 2 and has not yet taken a job elsewhere. He didn't offer a reason for his departure, saying, "just about anything I could say that would be accurate and honest would do more harm than good. Gosling was the chief technology officer for Oracle's client software group and, before that, the chief technology officer of Sun's developer products group.

Responding to a change in the licensing terms for developers building applications for version 4.0 of the iPhone, a technology evangelist for Adobe Systems has told Apple to go perform an anatomically impossible act. "Go screw yourself Apple," wrote Lee Brimelow, an Adobe platform evangelist, on his personal Web site, The Flash Blog. The post is the latest volley in an escalating war between Apple and Adobe. Last week, Apple changed the licensing language for its iPhone SDK in such a way that developers may not submit programs to Apple that use cross-platform compilers. As it happens, Adobe plans to introduce just such a cross-platform compiler with version 5 of its Creative Suite content creation package, due out today.

A scam Facebook page offering the site's users a US$1,000 Ikea gift card took in nearly 40,000 victims Friday. It's the latest example of a new and pernicious trend on the social-networking site as scammers -- usually disreputable online marketers trying to earn revenue by generating Web traffic -- have flooded Facebook with these fake gift card pages over the past months. In late March, a similar $1,000 Ikea gift card scam took in more than 70,000 victims, and just last week another scam Facebook page offering a $500 Whole Foods gift certificate was widely reported.

Nokia on Friday said it will acquire MetaCarta, a privately-held company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that specializes in finding content for location-aware services. MetaCarta's technology bridges the gap between content and maps, according to the company. Its Geosearch technology can find content, data and information about a place and present it in a single view and its Geotag technology can be used to find geographic references in various types of content, which then can be used in other applications. Nokia gave few details on how it plans to use MetaCarta's various technologies, only saying that it "will be used in the area of local search in location and other services."

...And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I'm Sumner Lemon in Singapore. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.