Maybe you’ve heard.  Oracle has is going to purchase Sun for $7.4bil, or $9.50 per share (a 42% premium over its current market cap).

We had been watching the dance between IBM and Sun for a few weeks now, and had speculated as recently as last week in “Worth a Click” that there was still a chance for those two crazy kids to work it out.   However, it appears possible that the ‘come hither’ noises Sun was making to IBM last week could have just been a negotiating tactic aimed at Oracle (Sun is going to Oracle for a mere  $0.10 more per share than IBM’s last best offer).

This is a good thing for Sun, a company with great technology that over the past 10 years has been mismanaged to its knees.  The conventional wisdom is that cofounder Scott McNealy’s almost personal obsession with rival Microsoft (whose products he once perhaps less than constructively described as “binary hairballs”) caused him spend years with his eyes off the ball.

It should also raise less antitrust concerns than the potential IBM-Sun union would have.   However, is it a good thing for Java?  It will be interesting to see how the realtively warm-and-fuzzy open source management of Sun’s seminal internet programming language will change under Larry “take-no-prisoners” Ellison.