Setting Sun

So, Sun Microsystems is partnering with Fujitsu to develop SPARC and open sourcing Java. My my.

The deal with Fujitsu is remarkable because Sun, like Apple, was once a hardware company at its heart, and SPARC was its crown jewel. Parting with someone else on SPARC is essentially Sun turning its back on its hardware roots, something that I thought I would never be able to do. We'll see if things work out. Java, on the other hand, was always slightly schizophrenic for Sun because it commoditizes hardware (and OS) -- thus consuming the other half of its business. Good thing it never caught on on the desktop and was relegated to chunky server-side programs only. Thanks to .NET and C#, it seems that the competition in the network-centric object-oriented language market has driven prices to marginal cost, i.e. zero. We'll see if Microsoft changes its C# licensing in any way.