So, the seemingly inevitable has been evaded: Sun and IBM will not be merging after all, with the deal foundering non IBM's reduced appraisal of the company's worth and discomfort with executive buyout clauses. Sun employees are angry at having their company's dirty laundry aired out in public, and who can blame them? They've had to read about their potential future in the news (and it wasn't looking pretty) only to be jilted. You can understand how they now want to go back to business as usual.

Except, of course, that it's hard to imagine business as usual continuing, since Sun has more or less publicly announced that it wants someone to buy it. That's not a big vote of confidence in the company as a standalone entity. And, if you care about Java, the other possibilities sound even worse. One particularly hair-raising possibility was a deal that IBM's offer supposedly precluded: a dismemberment of the company between Oracle and HP, with Oracle getting the software assets. Everyone who was nervous about how IBM would handle the Java Community Process and Java's openness in general: can you imagine Larry Ellison in charge of it? Perhaps you aren't going to have to imagine.