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To nearly everyone’s surprise, the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has thrown a last-minute banana peel in front of Larry Ellison’s bid to buy Sun and Java. Oracle is about to acquire Sun’s monumental collection of Java intellectual property rights. This includes the patents and copyrights to the code embodied in the Java platform editions (EE, SE and ME) and in dozens of critical Java standards (JSRs) associated with the platforms, as well as the all-important test suites (JCKs and TCKs) that determine what software can claim compatibility with these standards and thus receive these IP rights. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for the Java community to wrest some concessions from the new owner of Java before the deal is set in stone.