As Sun passes gently into that good night, a couple of interesting articles chronicle the moment of transition. The Register has a mildly jaundiced look back at Jonathan Schwartz’s history with the company. Schwartz’s rise paralleled the rise of software within a company that had really always been a hardware company. Schwartz actually came to Sun when his company Lighthouse Design acquired; the Wikipedia article on the company is an interesting read, as it discusses one of Sun’s previous and now mostly forgotten software-based crackpot schemes: OpenStep, which was a set of APIs based on the NeXTSTEP OS, and which was to provide a sort of cross-platform layer that would run atop all major operating systems. It never took off, and Java soon supplanted it as Sun’s cross-platform software doohicky of choice — and Schwartz would be one Java’s main champions within Sun.Schwartz won’t be worrying about his future, as he’ll be getting a cool $12 million in cash, plus stock worth $5 million, when the merger deal closes and he’s inevitably cut loose. As for the rest of us in Java’s corner, we’re more conflicted about its future. There’s a good point-counterpoint on Java’s future between Red Hat’s Mark Little and SpringSource’s Rod Johnson. Johnson is sanguine about Java’s prospects, while Little is anxious — though if you read between the lines, it seems their attitudes are much more determined by the extent to which their companies compete with Oracle than by any actual concrete reasons for worry. It appears that even the insiders will only be able to wait and see what will happen next. Technology Industry