Some lingering illnesses in my household kept me from getting a blog post in yesterday — which is just as well, as it gives me more Java To Go energy to tackle the rumors swirling this morning about a potential merger of Sun by Big Blue. Yes, that’s right: after months of seemingly idle speculation that someone — anyone — would take over the ailing company, significantly less idle speculation has hit two very major news sources this morning. Most of the buzz derives from this Wall Street Journal article, but Steve Lohr’s New York Times reporting seems to be independent, citing “a person with knowledge of the negotiations.” According to the WSJ, Sun tried — and failed — to woo HP into a merger earlier this year.So assuming that the rumors are true — and that the negotiations do result in a sale if they are — what does this mean? As has been the case with all big news involved with Sun’s apparent decline since I started this blog, I’m shocked by how little Java figures into much of the conversation out there. If IBM were to acquire Sun, there would be a huge number of doubled product lines — MySQL vs. DB2, Solaris vs. AIX (vs. two different Linux efforts!), Netbeans vs. Rational Application Developer, Niagara vs. Power Architecture — that would either need to be either integrated, or would need to fight it out to see who comes out on top. But Java is the one product in which the company wouldn’t have those kinds of existential problems. Not to say there wouldn’t be headaches — I think the first meeting between the rival JDK engineers will be exquisite in its awkwardness — but SunBM would be a Java hyperpower from day one, which makes me believe that Java is at the heart of IBM’s reasons for this acquisition.And what direction would a merged company take with the Java platform? IBM has been one of the major powers pushing for more openness in Java, so at first IBM taking control of Java would seem to bode well in that regard. But IBM has a definite interest in keeping Java open now because that lessens Sun’s control over it. Once IBM owns the right to the Java trademarks — and once the Java universe doesn’t have an outside power as big as IBM angling to keep Java open — things might get very different, very quickly. Folks at Sun are in a tizzy, of course: at least one programmer at Sun thinks that it’s all a conspiracy to overshadow the launch of Sun’s new cloud initiative today, and a commentor points out similiar rumors dating back to 1998. If nothing else comes of it, at least Sun’s stock is seeing a nice little rumor-related surge. Technology Industry