Finally the "behind the scenes" details of Sun's little dating game (ie hawking itself off) have been made public in the proxy statement Sun is required to file as part of the acquisition.

The Register gives a summarized explanation of the shenanigans if you don't want to read through the whoooole looooong proxy report.

One thing that is encouraging about this disclosure is Oracle will effectively become Sun's sugar daddy as the following question and answer states:

Q: What is the transaction?

A: Sun and Oracle have entered into a definitive agreement pursuant to which, subject to the terms and conditions of the merger agreement, Oracle will acquire Sun through the merger of a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle with and into Sun. Sun will be the surviving corporation (which we refer to as the surviving corporation) in the merger and will continue as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oracle.

This is also encouraging and I hope it remains this way indefinitely. This should allow Sun to continue innovating like it has for all these years, but now with a firm hand holding onto the purse strings (and hopefully having a hand in getting rid of some of the cruft in Sun's upper management).

I suspected this would be the case as the Sun name and brand is still very valuable and powerful and Oracle can now use both brands to it's full advantage. Time will tell how well this works.