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Sun Microsystems has announced plans to cut between 5,000 and 6,000 jobs - that's between 15 and 18 percent of its workforce.

"It blamed the cuts on the global economic downturn, but I think that like many other companies, Sun is using the downturn as an excuse for what were pre-existing problems, foretold by its stock price, which seems to be in an unending swoon," suggests GigaOM's Om Malik.

"How much has Sun spent to develop Solaris or Java?" asks InfoWorld's Neil McAllister. "How much must it continue to invest in maintaining other products, which, despite being open source, have no appreciable development community? To say these products are not loss leaders suggests something akin to Hollywood accounting."

The answer? "Spin off Java," McAllister added in a later post. "Just get rid of it - farm it out to an industry consortium and let the companies that depend upon it manage it..."

More here from CNET News ... more here from the Guardian ... more here from ZDNet ... more here from TG Daily ... and the press release is here.