Update: Charles Nutter posts about the move on the Engine Yard blog.

Some interesting news hit my stream this morning, Sun’s JRuby team is leaving the company and moving to Engine Yard.  The announcement came from Computerworld:

Sun Microsystems’ JRuby team is leaving the company to work for application hosting company Engine Yard, citing the uncertainty surrounding Sun’s planned acquisition by Oracle.

Sun hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, often called "the JRuby Guys," about two-and-a-half years ago so they could work full time on JRuby, an implementation of the Ruby programming language for the Java Virtual Machine. Some months later Sun hired Nick Sieger, another key JRuby developer.

All three will start work at Engine Yard next week. Nutter said they decided to leave Sun largely because of the uncertainty resulting from its acquisition by Oracle, a deal that’s expected to close later this summer pending regulatory approvals.

This is such great news for JRuby, an alternative to the original MRI version of Ruby.  JRuby, in my opinion, is an important Ruby implementation which helps enterprise developers ease Ruby into companies heavily vested in Java technologies.

Although the announcement has not made it to the Engine Yard blog as of the time I am writing this, I am sure it will be there soon.  Engine Yard recently announced support for JRuby in the Engine Yard Cloud.

I personally was disappointed to learn that Oracle was buying Sun, my first thoughts were about future development of JRuby and MySQL.  At least this should help clear up the future of one of those open source projects.