The announcement confirms the Wall Street Journal’s report Wednesday on the resignation, though the newspapers sources seemed to disagree whether Verwaayen was forced out by the board or if the decision was mutual.

“Alcatel-Lucent has been an enormous part of my life,” Verwaayen said in an Alcatel-Lucent statement. “It was therefore a difficult decision to not seek a further term, but it was clear to me that now is an appropriate moment for the Board to seek fresh leadership to take the company forward.”

When France’s Alcatel and the U.S.’s Lucent Technologies merged six years ago, the combined company was supposed to dominate telecom infrastructure. Its portfolio spanned both the wireline and wireless markets from optical networking to IP routing to 4G base stations. But the last half decade hasn’t been kind to telecom equipment makers and even less so to Alcatel-Lucent. The company has struggled financially, and it’s lost competitive ground both to traditional rivals like Sweden’s Ericsson and to more recent challengers from Asia like Huawei.

On the wireless side, Alcatel-Lucent plowed its resources into LTE. It built an innovative new radio architecture called lightRadio, and focused on landing early key contracts. At first that strategy seemed to be succeeding. Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint awarded the company major portions of their massive LTE contracts, but the deals began to peter out after those initial big wins. The vendor was left out of big European deals even in its home country of France.

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One day after Philipp Humm’s surprise resignation from T-Mobile, Vodafone announced he has joined its ranks. Humm won’t just be supervising one of Vodafone’s numerous European subsidiaries – he will take charge of eight of them: Germany; the UK; the Netherlands, Turkey, Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Romania.

That explains Humm’s sudden departure. T-Mobile USA’s parent company Deutsche Telekom is one of Vodafone’s biggest competitors. In fact, by running Vodafone Germany Humm will be going head-to-head with T-Mobile Germany, the DT subsidiary he once led.

Vodafone announced the appointment as part of a larger European reorganization. Vodafone is splitting the continent into two operating regions. Italy CEO Paolo Bertoluzzo will run the second region which encompasses southern Europe and includes Vodafone’s carriers in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Albania, and Malta.

The move is definitely a step up for Humm. While T-Mobile USA is a huge operator by European standards, it’s the smallest of the U.S. Big 4 by far. In several of the countries Humm will be supervising, Vodafone’s carriers are the No. 1 and No. 2 players. He no longer has to assume the role of the scrappy challenger.

Humm won’t assume his new Vodafone mantle until Oct. 1, which is the day after his contract with Deutsche Telekom officially ends. It’s now pretty clear Humm isn’t being punished for his role in the AT&T-Mo debacle. Quite the opposite, he’s being rewarded with an even more important job (albeit by a different company).

That leaves T-Mobile in a bit of turmoil. It needs to scramble to find a permanent CEO while in the process of overhauling its network, launching LTE and executing its new “challenger strategy.” As I wrote yesterday though, the last thing a new T-Mobile CEO should do is try to ‘shake up’ the company, as new chiefs are wont to do. Humm and team had put together a compelling plan to take on T-Mobile’s larger rivals, and whomever winds up running T-Mo should give it a chance to work

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In his memo, Schwartz, a very highly regarded person in the open source community, who once had a widely followed blog that he eventually posted to less and less, noted the fact that Europe’s approval of the Oracle acquisition took nine months — a long time. Schwartz has, partly because of the rules surrounding proposed acquisitions, been very silent during that time. In today’s internal memo, he refers to the impact that “change in control” has upon any acquisition and describes how broadly it will affect all Sun employees:

“I’ve also led, and been a part of many, many acquisitions at Sun, both large and small. From those experiences, I’ve learned one very clear lesson–the single most important driver of a successful acquisition are the people involved–and how committed they are to the new owner’s mission. And the most effective mechanism I’ve seen for driving that commitment begins with a simple, but emotionally difficult step. Upon change in control, every employee needs to emotionally resign from Sun.”

Schwartz goes on to acknowledge that “some” employees will have places at Oracle, but clearly he doesn’t see himself as having one. what about his own future there? While Schwartz goes to lengths in the memo to express support for Larry Ellison, the fact is that Ellison is well-known as a difficult person to work with. Most of all, though, the quoted text above points to a disheartened person — a person whose heart is not in what he might be asked to do under Oracle.

During his tenure as CEO of Sun, Schwartz was best known as the pony-tailed lover of all things open source, quixotically dressed on stage in pinstripe suits. I’m betting he has serious doubts about Oracle’s intent to advance Sun’s open source efforts.

For example, why should Oracle drive the MySQL database division forward — after it had grown nicely — when it’s competition for Oracle’s own expensive, proprietary databases? Even Monty Widenius, co-founder of MySQL, has been asking that question. Many people in the open source community see Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL, and the long waiting period that Europe required to approve the deal (while many MySQL customers bailed) as sealing MySQL’s doom.

For that matter, why should Oracle care about overseeing the OpenOffice suite of open-source productivity applications? That’s just competing with Microsoft in a game that doesn’t go far. And we don’t even have to get into GlassFish and the countless other open-source software efforts at Sun that Oracle has little financial interest in supporting.

Schwartz’s decision to leave probably has a lot do with open source efforts that he cares about that are unlikely to flourish, and a lot do with money. admonition to employees to “emotionally resign from Sun” is a signal that the upcoming change in control at the company will run deep, and probably affect the company’s many open source efforts. That includes There is money that Oracle can save by extinguishing projects such as MySQL, or letting them languish. It may include There may be money that Oracle can reap through staff cuts and possibly cutting Sun’s hardware business. Schwartz’s decision Any future decision Schwartz makes regarding staying may also have to do with substantial money he’ll get as a result of his equity in Sun in any exit.

Sun’s positioning as an open source leader started to become sketchier last April when Oracle proposed the company’s acquisition. Today, we’re seeing the endgame of that pursuit from a huge player in proprietary software, and the beginning of the financial fallout to come. Money changes everything.

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