CNet's Matt Asay has a pretty provocative post on his blog today, saying that the EU's decision is a perverse gift to Oracle, like so: the delay will cause more and more customers and employees to flee Sun (a trend that's already happening), leaving Oracle to declare that, once the merger is approved, its original offer price no longer reflects Sun's diminished value, causing Sun to either accede to a humiliating reduction in price, or for the deal to flounder altogether (with Oracle swooping in to buy

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Well, as predicted, the European Commission has chosen to invoke its right to study the Oracle-Sun deal, with the fate of MySQL being the reason explicitly cited as the origin of the hold-up. Java watchers will have to stew for a few more months of limbo over a non-Java-related issue arising from an acquisition by Sun last year that may or may not have been a good idea at the time.

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The Java community is still waiting out the regulatory process for the merger of Sun and Oracle; since both companies are essentially forbidden to discuss their joint future -- and thus the future of Java -- in any meaningful way until the merger is approved, we've been condemned to sit and stew until who knows when. Still, the general outline is clear -- the new king is here, and it is Oracle -- and so you can hardly blame folks for rearranging things to match that reality.

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Earlier this week the US Department of Justice approved the Sun-Oracle merger -- which would be momentous news, except that, in this multinational world, that wasn't the only approval required to make the deal happen. The companies must now wait on the announcement from the European Commission, led in this area by European Commissioner for Competition Neelie Kroes (aka "Steelie Neelie").

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I'm on the record as Not Getting The Hype when it comes to cloud stuff; only time will tell whether this makes me like the guy who refused to get on the Network Computer bandwagon in 1997, or the guy who refused to get on the Internet bandwagon in 1994. But that hasn't stopped everyone else in the world from going stone code nuts, cloud-wise.

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The acquisition of SpringSource by VMware has given rise to an effluence of hyperbolic prose on the subject.

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If you follow this blog, you know my fascination with SpringSource and its empire-building ways. I must admit to having been caught off-guard by Monday's announcement that it became part of somebody else's empire, with VMware buying the company for a reported $420 million.

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It's not particularly unusual for multiple JSRs to cover the same ground. But it's nice to see when the issues that arise from such overlap get resolved. In the last few days, it appears that the two competing dependency-injection JSRs -- 299 and 330 -- have been harmonized as Java EE 6 looms.

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As I argued last week, a good deal of the anxiety about the future of Java post-merger comes from just a fear of the unknown. It's not that Oracle is menacing, exactly, or any more menacing than a typically ruthlessly efficient and profitable multinational corporation is. It's just that nobody knows exactly what the post-merger landscape will look like, and this absence of knowledge is mandated by law, as the players can't talk about detailed plans until the deal between Sun and Oracle has been firmed up.

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Earlier this week we noted that the JRuby guys (and I find it charming that they are universally referred to as "the JRuby guys") jumped ship from Sun (who had hired them specifically to improve JRuby) to Engine Yard, which offers hosting to Ruby on Rails applications.

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An interesting post from Peter Pilgrim on JavaLobby on the current state of JavaFX. A lot of it is stuff that's commonplace but still apparently necessary to explain to people -- don't learn JavaFX because it's cool, or not cool, or whatever, learn about it if you think an RIA is the right fit for your project and if JavaFX is the right RIA platform to fit your experience and the project's needs.

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If you thought Oracle's ravenous lust for buying more companies was sated by its purchase of Sun, well, think again, my friends. Today the company bought GoldenGate, which makes real-time data integration software; Oracle says the move will help it build a "comprehensive data integration platform," whatever that means.

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OK, so that's a cheap shot. But really, the big gripe against Java since forever was that it was slow, slow, slow. That's why Computerworld's recent article about other JVM languages is so intriguing, as it contains this quote from Tim Bray: "These days, the JVM, especially HotSpot, has extremely high performance." In other words, everyone's trying to latch onto that speedy JVM!

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Ha ha, obviously Tuesday when I implied today was the end of Sun I was getting way ahead of myself.

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If all goes well, by the time I put my next post up Sun's shareholders will have voted the company out of existence. Sun is sputtering into the sunset, revealing a a worse than expected loss in its final quarter as an independent company.

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