A fire sale where Oracle got IP they could figure out how to make money off of.

IBM should have bought Sun, or at least Java; it was a much more natural fit.

Given that IBM has turned Redhat Linux into the next Solaris after what they did to CentOS, I'm not sure that Java would have been better with IBM. At least Java has been getting updates and things still get released under OpenJDK.

IBM would have killed the hardware immediately. They wanted JAVA not the HW.

I was there. IBM tried to buy Sun. Lawyers said no.

Whose lawyers? IBM's, or Sun's? And why?

IBM. Regulatory risk issue.