There is almost a sense of inevitability to all of this. The best and the brightest leave , the foot-soldiers get cut and the company culture/technology dies a slow,quiet death.
Sad but inevitable.
Sad but inevitable.
I thought if you're that far up the ladder you have a lot of freedom.
Oracle can't/won't/isn't interested in keeping that culture around, and it is questionable what that culture actually brought about in value at Sun. After all, they weren't very good at making money. Oracle, on the other hand, is very good at making money, and perfectly happy letting the cool people work other places, acquiring their work if they decide they need it.
If there was some sort of news from Oracle, how they weren't interested in a class of products or they weren't interested in technology or anything like that, or maybe all all the senior sun guys were being demoted a notch or seomthing then folks would be screaming bloody murder and we'd all know about it. Oracle wants to continue to make money and Sun was more interested in making their team think they were the best, regardless of what the market showed. That's the difference.
Some of these guys simply might be better off elsewhere, their time might be past, but if they really want to show their greatness then they have an opportunity to do so now with real marketing might. I went through this with a company a few years back, we boot strapped it, got it going, came up with some good ideas and some products but didn't have the money to make them robust and didn't know how to sell; we got bought and maybe a quarter of the team saw that as the ending (nobody made any money at that point) and they put that kind of effort in, the others saw it as time to get real and do the hard work, take things to the next level.. It's just a natural sort of thing when companies get bought.
On the up side, I give the guys that are leaving some credit. They could just hang out and be dead weight, draw probably giant pay checks and not do a whole lot.
One very simple thing we do know about is that many/most?/nearly all??? of Sun's software people have seen their salaries significantly reduced. Even if this didn't hit directly people at Gosling's level it would substantially change a whole lot of things and certainly sends a number of negative messages.
It's not completely grim, the Maxine (JVM in Java) research group seems to be very productive and not losing principles, but they're working on an area that Oracle considers to be critical (JVMs in general and JVMs on top of VMs in particular).