The New York Times has a doozy of a story today on the drama that laid behind Sun’s decision to merge with Oracle, which process already had quite a bit of public drama in the first place. We all know that IBM courted Sun, then lowered its buying price enough to back away, before being absorbed by Oracle. The whole tale is told in Sun’s regulatory filing, and is couched in security by insufficiently obscure obscurity. There’s “Party A,” which looks to be IBM; but then there were also talks with a “Party B,” which the Times sources seem pretty sure is Hewlett-Packard.Now, one of the persistent pre-IBM rumors was that Oracle and HP would divvy Sun’s assets up between them, with Sun taking the software properties, including the all-important Java. Ellison apparently was proposing to buy Sun’s software only as late as March 12 — remember, the IBM/Sun rumors hit the press on March 18. Oracle apparently agreed to buy all of Sun’s assets, including the hardware, specifically to forestall and return to negotiations with IBM. In other words, in order to get Java, Oracle was willing to get into an entirely new line of business.Now, of course, Larry Ellison is talking a big game about keeping Sun’s hardware line intact and building Oracle appliances and whatnot, but the revelation that his initial plan was to snap up the hardware undermines that a bit. And, as ZDNet points out, Oracle and HP have a friendly relationship, so perhaps some or all of those hardware assets will be unloaded after a sufficiently face-saving period. What does this mean for Java? Well, it means that Oracle really wanted it — and really didn’t want IBM to have it. On the one hand, it’s nice to be wanted; being wanted implies resources in the wings. On the other hand, it might bode a heavy hand from Java’s new parent, to make sure the platform benefits Oracle more than it does anyone else. Technology Industry