Interarbor Solution principal analyst Dana Gardner had a drink with IBM Software chief Steve Mills last week. He said Mills thinks that the Oracle-Sun deal will go through but that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is buying Sun because he doesn't "understand the hardware business" and won't get his money's worth at the $9.50 a share Oracle is proposing to pay for it.
Well, what else is Mills (pictured on the main screen at JavaOne below, behind Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz) going to say; IBM supposedly walked on the deal.
Anyway, Gardner got Mills to talking about Java and Mills remarked that IBM has a long time to worry about Oracle's potentially iron grip on Java licensing because its renewal is years off and then Gardner made an interesting observation: that IBM had invented Java for the server for Sun and that it could reinvent it like making Apache Harmony a "Java doppelganger."
Of course, if Oracle fails to close on Sun and Sun goes belly up, Sun's IP will go to the block.