For years, Apple has known that there’s a certain cachet in being the company that takes on the 800-pound gorilla. In a lot of markets for enterprise middlewear and back-end products, that gorilla is Oracle, which only got bigger when it swallowed up BEA earlier this year. Now Sun is counting on disenchantment among users of BEA’s WebLogic Java container in regard to price hikes and an unclear roadmap for the product by trying to woo them over to Java CAPS. In addition to eternal fealty and support for Java CAPS, Sun is offering cold hard cash, which is to say, the customers will pay less cold hard cash than they would for future updates to WebLogic. Acquisitions always leave orphaned products and irritated customers in their wake, but one of the things that Sun is promoting about Java CAPS in this case is its open source status, which loosens customers’ dependence on Sun a bit. Ashesh Badani, Sun’s SOA head, says, “If you’re not satisfied with us, we don’t want to make it difficult for you to leave us. So it is up to us to really focus on customer satisfaction to be sure your deployment is going the way it should.” This might appeal to people who are anxious not about Sun’s current level of support, but of what they might get should Sun itself be assimilated into another company, rumors concerning which continue to fly. The latest rumored suitor: HP. Yikes! Technology Industry