UPDATE: Joy's Legacy Will Remain

But according to Joy, his legacy at Sun might have been much briefer. In an email, Joy told CRN he accomplished his goals at the company more than 10 years ago, and stayed on longer to work on a Unix project that never got off the ground.

"I've started and/or finished what I wanted to," Joy said of his reasons for leaving the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company. "In fact, I felt this way in 1987, but stayed to rewrite UNIX as an object-oriented OS, though the project failed, because it was before Java [and] needed a great language."

Joy has no grand plans for his life after Sun, but said he won't stop doing what he does best. "I'm going to write some new small code for fun and decompression, and talk to a bunch of people for a while," he said of his plans.

Back in 1982, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolscheim and Vinod Khosla were looking for a software expert to drive their new company's creative direction. No matter whom they asked in the San Francisco area, one name popped up: Bill Joy, a 22-year-old graduate student in electrical engineering at U.C. Berkeley. He also happened to be a Unix expert.

Nearly 21 years later, Joy, a 1999 inductee into CRN's Industry Hall of Fame, is still considered a technology oracle who has continued to recognize important technologies before they enter the collective computing consciousness.

Joy led the design of Berkeley Unix, one of the earliest examples of open-source development; helped create Sun's Network File System, which drove the then-revolutionary idea of distributed computing; and contributed to Sun's SPARC chip architecture.

Most recently, Joy, who helped develop the Java programming language in 1995, drove the creation of Project JXTA, an open-source, standard framework on which solution providers can build peer-to-peer applications.

Sources recently told CRN that Sun plans to incorporate JXTA technology into N1 and Project Orion, a Sun effort to integrate its middleware products into its Solaris operating environment. Some also say Sun is pondering the use of JXTA for its StarOffice suite of workforce productivity software.

On the heels of next week's Sun Network technology conference, Sun unveiled Tuesday that Joy would leave the company after more than 20 years. Greg Papadopoulos, Sun's CTO and executive vice president, now will assume Joy's responsibilities.

Burned out by the hellish traffic and daily grind of life in Silicon Valley, Joy packed up his family in the late '90s and began telecommuting from a new home in Aspen, Colo. The wild-haired engineer had not been a part of the day-to-day administration of Sun for some time, but has worked in recent years on creating innovation with new technologies and driving the company's technology vision.

Speaking to CRN at the OracleWorld conference in San Francisco, Sun Chairman, President and CEO Scott McNealy said there is no ill will between Joy and the company, and he wished Joy well in his new endeavors.

"Bill and I are best buddies and [his departure] was very amicable," McNealy said. "I'd like ot see him get passsionate and motivated and focused on something new,"

Solution providers said Joy's exit from Sun marks the end of an era for Sun.

Marc Maselli, president of Needham, Mass.-based solution provider Back Bay Technologies, said he is sorry to see Joy go because of what his presence at Sun meant for the company's technology vision.

"It is a shame given his history with the company and [Bill's] technical ties to the heart of what is 'Sun,'" Maselli said.

Joe Lindsay, CTO for Costa Mesa, Calif.-based solution provider eBuilt, said Joy's departure has even stronger implications for Sun's foundation as a company committed to open industry standards.

Lindsay, who previously worked for IBM, said when he left the Somers, N.Y.-based vendor in 1996, IBM was the "epitome of a closed system [in favor of] proprietary technology and against the idea of open standards."

But he said IBM and Sun have since switched roles. While IBM has committed to open source technologies such as Linux, Sun clings to its proprietary Unix-based Solaris OS and still holds the reins to Java, which should be an open-source effort rather than overseen by Sun.

"How strange is it that IBM is the company pushing open source and open standards while Sun is standing against things like open-sourcing Java," Lindsay said. "Sun has lost its leadership position, and Bill Joy has always been associated with Sun's vision. The loss of Joy completes the picture of a Sun being eclipsed."

Barbara Darrow contributed to this article.