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Sun's chief scientist Bill Joy, "a software pioneer who played a crucial role in creation of the Internet but became an outspoken critic of an over-automated society," is leaving the company, according to Reuters.

Here are just a few things this remarkable individual has done:

Joy, 48, a legendary software designer since his days at the University of California at Berkeley, led development of Sun's core technologies, including its Solaris software system and SPARC microprocessors, after helping to found the company in 1982 ...

Known as Sun's big-picture thinker, the boyish-looking Joy has had little to do with the Palo Alto, California-based company's day-to-day business operations for 15 years. But he played a key part as one of the developers and early backers of Sun's now ubiquitous Java software, as well as other Internet enhancements ...

And Mac OS X enthusiasts, please take note:

Joy ...may be best known in the computer industry for his work 25 years ago as the designer of the influential Berkeley Unix operating system, an academic variant of the AT&T Unix software system that is now used to run everything from telecommunications networks to stock markets worldwide.

The noncommercial Berkeley Unix (BSD) was an ancestor of many modern versions of Unix, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, which were forerunners of the open-source software movement that gave rise to Linux.

Comments: The above quotations may give you a sense of how influential a single human being can be. In that light, we also wish to point out that Bill Joy is not an uncritical advocate of all the technologies his work has spawned. As Reuters states, 'since 2000, Joy also has become a lightning rod of opposition to the notion that all scientific progress is good." He goes even further than that, suggested that humans themselves have become an endangered species due to the implications of robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotechology.

There would be no OS X without Bill Joy. We think anything this man has to say is worth listening to, and we will be very interested in seeing what direction his future activities may take.