There was some rumbling this week as Sun and HP hyped an upcoming announcement — would this presage the long-imagined and dreaded Sun merger? Well, no; as it turned out it was just another boring Solaris server distribution partnership; if we needed any more evidence that it would not lead to Hewlett-CompSun, Jonathan Schwartz called his blog post on the subject Live Free Or Die.But people are still convinced that some kind of merger or fire sale is in the works. The Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher says the whispers are all about Sun being bought by IBM. As is now typical in these discussions, Java appears to not even be part of the conversation, but certainly IBM as a buyer would be better for Java than a buyer whose main interest was Sun’s server line; IBM, after all, has invested a lot of money and energy into the Java platform over the years, and that interest would presumably only heighten if Big Blue came to own the trademark. In fact, the biggest worry in such a scenario might be that IBM’s hand would be too heavy for a language just starting to find its bearings as an open source project. Technology Industry