If, like me, you subscribe to blogs.sun.com en masse, you know when layoffs are afoot when you see a rash of good-bye posts on said blogs. Sure enough, the wistful comments from departing Sunnies (do they call themselves Sunnies? they should...) that were lighting up my RSS reader all day were followed by confirmation of 1,300 layoffs.

I've speculated about when the Sun layoffs are really going to start hitting Java where it hurts, and according to the Register, this may be it, as the cuts are coming in the company's open source and Java areas; in particular, they claim that "among those gone are brains who worked on the OpenJDK, desktop Java, and the Java 2 Standard Edition (JavaSE) interface." It remains to be seen how extensive the personnel removal in those areas are, but if something so core to the language as Java SE and the much heralded OpenJDK can have resources cut or removed entirely, then what could possibly be safe?