Sun is continuing its acquisitions strategy, not of companies but prominent open source programmers.

James Gosling today announced during his keynote at Sun Tech Days in Sydney Australia that Ted Leung and Frank Wierzbicki will be joining Sun to work on all of the company's Python projects. 

Leung is an author, a member of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and a long-time Python developer at the Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF). Wierzbicki is the lead implementer of the Jython project (Python on the Java VM). The two join Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock, JRuby creators Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo and Nick Kew, a leading developer on the ASF platform, who have recently joined Sun to pursue open source projects.

The Python language is a dynamic object-oriented programming language that is used for a variety of applications, from desktop to Web applications. Sun is a platinum sponsor in the upcoming PyCon 2008 conference in Chicago this month. 

Sun's strategy as of late has been to broaden its virtual machine to support a number of dynamic languages, not just Java. CEO Jonathan Schwartz told attendees of the SugarCRM Customer and Developer conference last month that Sun wants to "take the J of the JVM and just make it a VM."