Eric S. Raymond, writing at Newsforge, says "inside Sun, I hear that talent is bailing out of the company because they just don't believe the Solaris-will-prevail story management is peddling."

"Most of Sun's techies are running Linux on their PCs at home," ESR continues. "They can see the handwriting on the wall."

He adds that in retrospect, the open source community ought perhaps to have foreseen the rocky patch up ahead for Sun the moment it heard what he calls "the recent pronunciamento that Sun has no Linux strategy." This, in Raymond's view, was tantamount to a "final admission of failure" by Sun.

"Sun can't run at the lean profit margins that are all a commoditized Linux server market will support," he argues. "Their cost structure is all wrong for it. They got trapped in a classic innovator's dilemma and didn't cannibalize their own business while they had the investor confidence and maneuvering room to do so. Cuddling up to SCO didn't help, either."

And now, if Reuters is to be believed, it may be  too late.

"Moody's has just about dropped Sun into the junk-bond basement." Raymond observes. "The recent product announcements have been duds, and the upcoming quarterlies are going to be a disaster. Wall street analysts are calling for drastic job cuts and speaking the code phrases that mean "run for the hills!" The smell of death is in the air."

Raymond saves his most interesting speculation till last.

"The real question is twofold," he muses, then asks rhetorically: "Can OpenOffice.org survive without Sun, and where will Java land?"

Here is ESR's own answer". "Probably not at Microsoft; with C# in the picture, it is unlikely that Microsoft even wants to own Java any more. I have to guess that IBM is the most likely to shoulder both technologies, simply because nobody else is really positioned to do it. But that, of course, raises other worries -- is it really good for [the open source community] if IBM has a lead position in everything?"

• Who Owns Unix?
• 'ESR' Writes Open Letter to Darl McBride
• 'No More Mr Nice Guy,' Warns Eric S. Raymond
• Flashback to '04: "Let Java Go" – ESR Writes Open Letter to Sun

• The reaction of "Cher Price" (geddit?)