To hear The Register tell it, Sun execs were very much taken aback by the spanner thrown into the Sun-Oracle merger works, thus extending the twilight period in which Sun spins its wheels waiting to be absorbed into Oracle and the products it sells and develops to be integrated into Oracle’s roadmap. Presumably, when father of Java James Gosling was scheduled to give the keynote at Oracle Develop next week, it was assumed that he’d be an Oracle employee by then. Instead, he’ll still be talking as a sort of emissary from another company — one that legally can’t talk too much about the direction of the post merger company, even if that’s exactly what everyone is interested in. At best, his talk — “The Top 10 Things You May Not Know About Software at Sun” — will serve to convince Oracle developers that the work put into the merger will be worth it.There’s an extra layer of potential awkwardness if the Register’s rumormongering is true, because it may be that the annual JavaOne developer conference is slated to be spiked once the merger has been completed, replaced in the future by an extended Java presence at Oracle OpenWorld. Over at JavaLobby, this rumor has elicited a host of encomiums for what had been Sun’s landmark conference. Among much sighing and hand-wringing over the great dynamic at previous JavaOne shows comes this cogent observation from Eugene Ciurana: Oracle OpenWorld “is not a developers conference; it’s an IT conference. It’s focused on business and other topics that have little to do with development. JavaOne is a nuts-and-bolts affair first, an engineers conference, a place where the élite and the newbies meet for a frank and fun exchange of ideas and experiences.” And what more evidence of this do you need than the layout of the current OpenWorld? Here’s the first line of that blog post from Sun lined to above about Java’s presence there:Oracle OpenWorld 2009 begins on Sunday, October 11, and continues until October 15 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, California. Oracle Develop, a premier developer conference for Oracle technologists sponsored by Sun Microsystems, takes place from October 11 to 13 at the nearby San Francisco Hilton. The San Francisco Hilton is a good-sized place, but it’s definitely a sideline to the enormous convention center at Moscone — which is, as it happens, where JavaOne traditionally takes (took) place. Technology Industry