Looks like Sun is setting as an independent company - Oracle is buying them out at $9.50 a share:

Oracle and Sun announced Monday that they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. That puts the value of the transaction at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun's cash and debt.

Oracle isn't a hardware company, and hasn't ever been a hardware company - so it should be interesting to see what happens in that regard. Sun's been getting killed as intel commodity hardware has moved relentlessly up stack, so it wouldn't surprise me to see most of Sun's hardware disappear.

Oracle also hasn't been that big a player in the OSS space, so it's unclear to me what will happen there. I expect to see MySQL become more compatible with the eponymous Oracle database, in order to make upsells more possible for large scale users of MySQL.

Finally, I'd say this adds a lot of question marks on Java as well. Does Oracle take the IBM route, and create a Java foundation? Or do they suck it back into the more closed Oracle world? Anyone want to guess how long Schwartz stays on in any capacity?

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