Yes, I got somewhat emotional(?) too. It was a birthplace of so many great ideas-- Java being the least of them. I personally feel "The network is the computer" was one of the most important ideas of the last century (the other being "a computer on every desk"), and one that Google and others are capitalizing on today.
It's really sad to see such a company dissolve away.
In addition to being a bit sad, I'm having a technical problem with the website. It redirects me to oracle.mobi, which I guess is the mobile version of the site. Not good for the company image, I guess.
Note: my user agent is "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2) Gecko/20100115 Firefox/3.6 Slackware Linux".
I've said it before and I'll say it again; anyone using MySQL in new projects is living dangerously. PostgreSQL is the future. This makes me happy and a little sad. :/
I did too. They had one of the cleverest logos I've seen. With this redirect dies one of the oldest sites on the web. Sun.com had the 11th oldest registered domain name (tied with IBM.com) https://www.iwhois.com/oldest/
I liked their logo as well. I used to work there and I was the lead on a long dead product called sparc cluster I. The logo we created for that was a play on the Sun logo and the product itself.
I tried to do some rudementary research, but without more work it is hard to know if the current owner is the original owner, or just a corp with the same name. I caught ISC as one of these abandoned domains, there may be more.
Oldest Domains:
1. Symbolics.com => Domain Squatter
2. BBN.com => Owned by Raytheon
3. Think.com => Owned by? Oracle
4. MCC.com => Domain Squatter
5. DEC.com => HP.com
6. Northrop.com => Northropgrumman.com
7. Xerox.com
8. SRI.com
9. HP.com
10. Bellcore.com => Telcordia.com
11. IBM.com
11. Sun.com => oracle.com
13. Intel.com
13. TI.com
15. ATT.com
16. GMR.com => Broken?
16. TEK.com
18. FMC.com
18. UB.com => ultimatebet.com
20. Bell-ATL.com => verizon.com
20. GE.com
20. Grebyn.com => broken?
20. ISC.com => Aquired by Kodak who abandoned domain
As a general rule, don't trust anything that's said during an acquisition. Those communiqués are designed to assuage shareholder, employee and fan fears and usually get, uhm, reinterpreted within the first year.
Here's something: "But the really eye-opening thing about Wednesday's presentation was just how much Oracle actually had to say about Java. I expected superficial affirmations like Ellison gave at OpenWorld; what I got was almost too much to process." http://infoworld.com/print/111021
Maybe they can do something with sunsolve next. That site and the backend has been terrible for at least a year due to the failed backend change they were working on forever. No one on the Sun side knew where my cases were half the time.
When Oracle acquired BEA, they took them offline for awhile.
This sucked, as the BEA products seem to demand frequent trips to the online references, and troubleshooting guides. Actually, it still sucks, because although they have replaced most of the documentation that was available (the most valuable bits were the dev2dev and forum areas) they often link back to BEA, which redirects you to Oracle's front page, or to the front of their BEA documentation section, but absolutely never to anywhere resembling where the link was intending to go.
For the moment I wouldn't worry and would expect them to come back ... although maybe they'll need some prodding for some of the things that fall through the cracks.
Java was the first real language that I learned, back in the days of BufferedReader and no generics ... I'm still young in the programming world, but to see my first and favorite programming language's developer being bought out is ... most sad, to me.
I suspect it is because I'm in a period of mourning, but ... Java just doesn't feel the same to code in right now... like it's been killed, even though it's still around...
Edit: Consoling myself that this is a better fate than just dying off like SGI