Sun's fate was always a concern before Java was GPL'd, but it is an entity in its own right now. So, whilst Sun is the lead cheerleader, should they fail there are enough big companies (IBM for one) heavily invested in Java that one of them would take over the reigns.

Sun should focus on producing Java acceleration hardware, especially making multicore behemoth servers designed for Java thread concurrency. Sun already has enterprise customers, they own Java, and Java is their customers platform of choice.

I wonder if "it's open source, this will go on irrespective of corporate situation" is a powerful retention/new acquisition argument for Sun (for Java and OpenSolaris) -- and could ultimately what keeps them alive amidst fears.

I had a feeling this would happen as soon as Sun changed its stock ticker symbol to JAVA.