No doubt you’ve heard about Sun’s massive layoffs last week, which accompanied a major reorganization of the company. Everything server-related — Solaris, the server hardware, the new storage appliances that Sun has been touting so loudly — goes into a Systems Platforms group; Java, MySQL, and infrastructure software like GlassFish go into an Application Platforms Software group; and a Cloud Computing Developer Platforms group will focus on the company’s Web services and NetBeans.Here’s what jumps out at me about that division of labor: that Systems Platform group accounts for the vast majority of Sun’s revenues, at least at the moment. If I were looking to spin off or sell my other, unprofitable divisions — or, alternately, spin off the one division that I knew I could get money for now, to focus on the stuff that I believed was the future — this is how I’d do it. The first tack would be more straightforward, and is in fact what former Sun exec Peter Yared suggested in a Forbes article published the day before the reorg: Yared thinks Schwartz is smart enough to save the company if it seriously streamlines its product line … He suggests the company should also spin out its Java programming-language division, killing another sacred cow. “Honestly, it’s a legacy language at this point,” says Yared … Sun should let other tech giants who benefit from Java, like IBM and Oracle, oversee the programming language in an industry consortium, Yared suggests. Those companies could kick in money every year to support it, taking the burden (and lots of employees) away from Sun. As a pessimist, I’m more than willing to believe that Sun is ready to abandon Java. But I also think, though there’d be a period of disruption, this might not be so terrible — look at what Mozilla did once freed from Netscape. The move to let other companies have more institutional stake in the future of the language might take the form Yared suggests, or might be more gradual, as this Dzone piece speculates — with IBM and others picking up the slack as Sun is unwilling or unable to put the resources into the language that it has in the past.But some of Sun’s actions don’t look like they’re quite ready to take this step just yet. Sun’s been going the extra mile to present itself as a software company, and while Java hasn’t necessarily featured quite so strongly in those discussions, MySQL has; the fact that Sun has yoked them together in a single division implies that Sun sees a profitable (for Sun) future in the language. The division is being taken over by Anil Gadre, formerly Sun’s marketing honcho; that background implies that Sun still sees Java and MySQL as a way to market its (hopefully profitable) hardware. Gadre’s ascendancy also means that Rich Green is out; over at O’Reilly Timothy O’Brien speculates that this shuffle will provide cover to kill off, or at least funnel sparse resources away from, JavaFX, and put more emphasis on the core language again.This will all play out in delicious drama over the coming weeks, so stay tuned! Software Development