The news couldn’t be missed today. Both Sun and Oracle commented on their respective website shortly after the news hit the press and many people on blogs, twitter and other channels followed.
It’s interesting to see how much consolidation has happened in the Java community in recent years. First there was the major acquisition of JBoss by RedHat almost 3 years ago. Next was BEA, being gobbled up by Oracle little over a year ago. And, while the news that talks between IBM and Sun had stalled still hadn’t faded, the Java powerhouse is being acquired by Oracle. This means there are only a few public companies left with a large and prominent involvement in Java EE, most notably Oracle, IBM and RedHat. I shouldn’t forget Google for all their involvement in Java, but then again, their main business is still in ads, not selling hardware, software and services.