“We Are All One” is the optimistic title of an Oracle Technical Network post on the merger on developers.sun.com and java.sun.com into the aforementioned Oracle Technical Network. (Full and probably unnecessary disclosure: I did some freelance editing work for the OTN back in the early ’00s.) The article outlines what exactly this means; it’s kind of boring, but it’s a big job, and, if Oracle isn’t going to keep the Sun brand around (and there’s no indication that they plan to do so), a necessary one. This is the sort of branding exercise that can seems like corporate crap, and stick in the craw of people loyal to the brand of the company that was absorbed, but what else do you expect Oracle to do?One of the people in whose craw such acts stick is no doubt James Gosling, and so it isn’t surprising that he was so amused by a similar act of rebranding by Oracle — one that went somewhat awry. Essentially, the “company” field in the latest release of Java for Windows was changed from “Sun Microsystems, Inc” to “Oracle.” A seemingly harmless change — but it caused crashes for people using Eclipse (i.e., many, many of them).It is a pretty funny thing to happen, but it’s not, as near as I can see, something that’s particularly Oracle’s fault. I’m not quite smart enough to get my head around the details, but apparently the root cause is the fact that there was already an anomaly in Sun’s Java that caused Eclipse to freak out a bit; as a workaround, Eclipse simply ignored the anomaly if “Sun Microsystems, Inc” was in the “company” field of the Java install. It seems more to me less an instance of Oracle “breaking” Java and more an instance of an old bug that should have been fixed long ago rearing its ugly head after a hack workaround no longer helped. But the story has legs because it feeds into people’s pre-existing ideas of Oracle as a Borg-like absorber of all — and people’s natural fondness in seeing a big guy tripped up. Technology Industry