InfoWorld’s Paul Krill has meticulously put together a list of Sun folk who have fled the company since the merger with Oracle was completed. If you’re interested in Java — or Sun’s software generally, much of which was to one degree or another built around the Java brand — then what will really jump out at you from the list is that they’re all software people. Despite the quote from Forrester analyst John Rymer that ends the piece — “I still don’t think [Oracle has] figured out the [plan for Sun’s] hardware” — two of the three Sun alums on Oracle’s executive page are hardware people, and the third was in “operations.” All of the software bigwigs are gone — Schwartz, who couldn’t have expected anything else, but also Java inventor James Gosling, open source honcho Simon Phipps, general rock star Tim Bray, and the heads of the JRuby and OpenSSO teams.Is there a logic to all this? Well, a lot of the dark hints pieced together from the departees various blog posts point to money issues; much of the Sun brass was offered sharply reduced salaries if they stayed. This might have simply been a way to get rid of the unwanted leadership of a conquered company without firing them per se — after all, generally people at that level take a pay cut as an insult, as their salary denotes their power and influence within the company. On the other hand, much of the word from inside the company has been about “culture clash,” with Sun interested in exploring and developing cutting-edge new technologies and Oracle fanatically fixated on the bottom line. It may be that these lower salaries were Oracle’s unflinching assessment of what these software folk were really worth in terms of revenue generation, since much of what they produced was hard to value and often given away for free.If that’s the case, then we may well see some changes in much of the Java-related tech that Sun has traditionally given away — the JVM, GlassFish, NetBeans, etc. The message to the remaining employees might well be: earn your keep, and with cash, not “innovation” or “developer goodwill.” Technology Industry