“Dogfooding” is a verb that derives from the phrase “eat your own dog food” — which, in IT circles, means using the products you sell internally. A rather famous example was Microsoft’s moves to shift the infrastructure behind its Hotmail service from BSD to Windows servers.Sun can be said to eat its own dog food to a certain extent when it comes to software. The Glassfish application server is, for instance, largely written in Java. Yet despite Java’s huge prominence, the fact is that Sun isn’t a software company (as James Gosling wisecracked earlier this week at Oracle OpenWorld). Java hasn’t necessarily been the core ingredient to all those pricey servers that have actually been making money for Sun (despite what the deliberate branding confusion would imply).Oracle by contrast, just made a huge bet on Java, basing its upcoming line of Fusion middleware on the platform. This is the stuff the next level up the stack from the database that is the next frontier of Oracle’s moneymaking schemes, and it’s tremendously important to them. I’d bet that half the reason they bought Sun was not because they necessarily wanted to control Java, but because they were terrified of what would happen if IBM did. But they do control it now, and the interesting part is that this turns the dog food metaphor on its head. Oracle isn’t eating its own dog food to prove to the other dogs that the dog food is tasty; rather, it became so dependent on the dog food that it bought the dog food factory. The next logical step, of course, is to make the dog food taste the way Oracle wants it to taste. And what does that mean for the other dogs? Technology Industry