Longtime GNOME Contributor & Oracle Principal UX Designer Leaves The Company

The latest talent to have departed Oracle is a longtime GNOME contributor who has at Oracle/Sun Microsystems for nearly the past two decades.

Calum Benson who had been involved with GNOME since 2000 and was particularly active during the Sun Microsystems days with GNOME 1.x and GNOME 2.x, involved in improving the usability of GNOME, has announced his sunset at Oracle.

Calum worked on the GNOME stack for Solaris 10, led the OpenSolaris desktop user-interface specification, worked on the first-ever GNOME usability study in 2001, and was granted an emeritus GNOME Foundation member in 2015. During the recent Oracle years he continued working on the Solaris desktop and its applications, was part of the user experience team working on Solaris storage projects, and served as a principal UX designer.

His next endeavor is yet to be decided following his long tenure at Sun/Oracle nor did he elaborate on his departure from Oracle in the aforelinked blog post. We certainly hope he'll end up in another position where he will be able to benefit GNOME or the broader open-source ecosystem.

2017 has been a tough year on Oracle employees with many being let go, particularly across their Solaris / ZFS / SPARC groups around the world. On TheLayoff.com there is still continued talks about more rumored layoffs.