Thanks to Izumo S. for sending in this item.

A new website devoted to Sun Labs projects being jettisoned by Oracle (or soon-to-be-jettisoned) and their users and researchers will start up this weekend. “Red Giant Phase” is now accepting members (free) and has groups for Project Wonderland, SunSPOT, Darkstar, DReaM, and others.

Discussions about where these projects and their code will go in the future, blogs, and even a *mild defense of Jonathan Schwartz* are on the site.

You can join Red Giant Phase by going to http://sunorphans.ning.com

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has twittered his resignation.

“Today’s my last day at Sun. I’ll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku.
Financial crisis/Stalled too many customers/CEO no more”

Oracle announced yesterday that it has completed the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Inc.

I’ve started collecting documentation for Tadpole and RDI portable systems and putting it up at http://www.sunhelp.org/tadpole.

If you have any documentation for Tadpole or RDI systems in an online format, please get in touch with me so that I can add it to the archive.

From Jim Gosling’s weblog:

Oracle will be holding a webcast detailing its plans for Sun on Wednesday, January 27 starting at 9am PT.

“Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, will outline the strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and how customers will benefit from having all components – hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications – engineered to work together.”

In related news, the European Commission has unconditionally approved Oracle’s purchase of Sun.

eWeek has published this slideshow with “10 Reasons Why Sun is Still Relevant (and one reason why not)”.

As described in this press release, the SPARC Enterprise 3000 is now available with the 2.76Ghz SPARC64-VII quad-core processor.

Sun has released a new version of VirtualBox, its free desktop virtualization software.

“VirtualBox 3.1 introduces the virtualization industry’s first “Teleportation” capability, allowing running virtual machines to be moved, uninterrupted between disparate hosts – including those on different operating systems, different classes of computer (e.g. server to client) and even different CPUs (e.g. Intel to AMD).”

WikiLeaks has published some details about a “Project Peter” that was at one time in development at Sun to facilitate migrations from Oracle to MySQL for some customers.

Sun and Fujitsu have announced new SPARC64 VII processors for SPARC Enterprise servers.

Running at 2.88GHz for the SPARC Enterprise M9000 and M8000 servers and 2.53GHz for SPARC Enterprise M5000 and M4000 servers, the new processors provide increased single-thread and overall system performance, while the enhanced memory controller in the SPARC Enterprise M8000 and M9000 servers improves throughput under memory-intensive workloads.

More information can be found here.

A recent Oracle ad posted in the European edition of the Wall Street Journal, also available on the Oracle website:

Sun’s stockholders have voted to approve the agreement where Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash.

Sun has reported preliminary financial results for its Q4 fiscal year 2009 period.

Sun expects revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 in the range of $2.580 to $2.680 billion, as compared with $3.780 billion for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2008.

Sun anticipates GAAP net loss per share for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2009 in the range of $(0.24) to $(0.34). On a non-GAAP basis, Sun expects net loss per share in the range of $(0.06) to $(0.16). Non-GAAP net loss per share excludes amortization of acquisition-related intangibles, stock-based compensation, restructuring and related impairment of long-lived assets, settlement income, net gain or loss on equity investments and the tax effect of these non-GAAP adjustments.

This Register article talks about ZFS getting data deduplication capabilities later this year.