BEA told Oracle it can take its offer and stuff it... with more dollars. But it seems that BEA has got itself in a fine pickle, and I'm not sure it will have any choice but to accept Oracle's bid. The only question, really, is how soon.

Uber-investor Carl Take-the-Money-Icahn has bought enough shares of BEA in recent weeks to earn the right to mouth off. And what he says is, "Go sell, young man!"

No less an expert in being acquired by a bigger fish than JBoss founder Marc Fleury told eWEEK super-reporter Darryl Taft that Oracle's offer "sounds damn good."

Of course, if BEA were to accept Oracle's bid, one of the winners could conceivably be JBoss acquirer Red Hat, a platform vendor in its own right that could benefit from customer anxiety.
Meanwhile, as with PeopleSoft, customers have to sit on the sidelines and await the fate of an application they already picked over Fusion and the others.