"I was rather disturbed by some news reports a couple of weeks ago that said that Sun is considering merging its Sun Network conference in with JavaOne 2005 (see Sun postpones Network product event, for example). What's up with this?
"Sun Network is a Sun-specific conference for its customers and partners that is firmly rooted in Sun's commercial interests. Most of the large vendors have one or more such conferences a year and, of course, they are well within their rights to do so. We'll all continue to do so while we can afford to hold the conferences. Moreover, the conferences morph over the years as times change. For example, since IBM [owns] Rational, we merged the old Rational Users Conference with IBM developerWorks Live. This makes sense and supports our customers and partners. Microsoft and others do similar things..."