Well, it looks like Oracle will be buying Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion.
I must say I never really understood Sun’s business model. Their hardware seemed incredibly specialized and overpriced, while at the same time their didn’t seem to be much compatibility with Solaris. Essentially, they didn’t seem to be creating the ideal system. They then released Java, which is designed to work on any operating system and on any hardware. Java of course became incredibly popular, but you didn’t need to use Sun’s systems at all. I happily program in Java on my Windows and Linux box and to a lesser extent, my Mac (Java support lagging because Apple does the porting). I get all the benefits of Sun’s software for free and don’t have to buy any of the hardware.
Oracle should take care of things, I think. It would be cool to see better database support in Java now that two of the major DBMSes are owned by the same company (Oracle and MySQL).