They're all Apache 2, which is about as permissively decoupled from the organization as it gets. Oracle could disappear tomorrow, delete all the repos, or begin charging $5,000/seat for this software, and nothing would happen. You could, literally, fork all three, rename them, and run off on your own projects and have a merry 'ole time.

In fact, everyone going after Oracle in this thread should do exactly that right now.

You are right in theory, however it's very rare for abandoned or mishandled OSS projects to gain new life by forking. Most of the knowledge, expertise and incentives are tightly coupled with the original creators.

Also, open source license doesn't cover patents, so they could decide to sue for patent infringement, which I don't thunk is likely, but if there ever was a company that might try something like that it's oracle.

> Also, open source license doesn't cover patents

http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Patent_clauses_in_software_licences...

The patent assignment and retaliation clause, in Apache 2.0 §3, is one of the key reasons to use it. Your hypothetical would not happen.

> however it's very rare for abandoned or mishandled OSS projects to gain new life by forking.

Given the counterexamples that have sprung to life from Oracle's behavior in the past (MariaDB, Jenkins), I find this a very odd observation in this thread.

didn't realize apache had a patent clause. That's awesome.

The Apache-2.0 patent clause inspired the GPLv3 patent clause (previously Apache-2.0 was incompatible with GPLv2 because GPLv2 didn't have a patent clause).

This is why MIT/Apache2 dual licensed is popular; Apache2 contains a patent clause, but isn't GPL compatible, so you can use the Apache2 variant if you don't use anything GPL, but use the MIT variant if you have to have compatibility.

I have been using Oracle products since around 1996 and will keep using them.

MS SQL Server is the only one that can compete with PL/SQL, the feature lists, and the GUI tooling provided out of the box for database administration, report generation and data modeling.

Java, they have made quite a few improvements to the language and runtime, some of them even unthinkable under Sun's stewardship, namely adding Graal to the official JDK and adding AOT support (most commercial JDK have it since early days of Java).

Also their roadmap for value types, GPGPU, fully replacing Hotspot with Graal and eventually having OpenJDK mostly implemented in Java, after those changes are done.

They created SPARC M7 with Silicon Secured Memory, as yet another band-aid against C security exploits.

So while the company might be heavy profit oriented, it is no different than any other corporation that likes money.

To say that Oracle is no worse than any other profit oriented company is not quite true.

It is the worst company that we in the open source community know of.

Everything they touch dies. If it does not die, it probably should, probably even for technical reasons.

VirtualBox seems to be an exception to the rule?

One can argue VBox has been on life support since Oracle acquired it from Sun. I'm puzzled about why they haven't shut it down too.. maybe some profitable support contracts? Internal usage?

To me, it is. I've never really had a problem with it, other than feeling dirty using Oracle software.

A couple of examples where they failed the Java community:

Hudson (now Jenkins)

JavaEE 8 (delayed, uncertainity around at least one JCP. Really poor communication.)

A couple of examples where Sun failed the Java community:

- Java3D

- JOGL

- Java Desktop Integration apis

- Java packaging for desktop apps (Oracle eventually did it with the JavaFX reboot)

- Requiring devs to master the "Filthy Rich Clients" book in order to create cool Swing interfaces

- Making a mainstream product out of Sun SPOT before Arduinos and RaspberryPIs were a thing

- Ensuring J2ME fragmentation wasn't the way it turned out to be

- Supporting AOT compilation to native code, while all commercial vendors selling JDKs were doing it since the early days.

- Creating a GNOME based desktop named Java Desktop System

Sun wasn't all flowers and hugs regarding Java development.

No mention of their stewardship of Solaris I note ;)

If you look at my comment history you will see that as big Xerox PARC and ETHZ fan, I am not a big supporter of UNIX in general.

Last time I touched Solaris in production was in 2002.

Yeah I did play with the OpenSolaris and Solaris 10/11 images, but really didn't saw any value on actually using it.

The fact is that *BSD and GNU/Linux variants killed the commercial UNIXes in the server room, the variants being sold are mostly tied to maintenance contracts.

Even Sun wouldn't be able to keep their Solaris business going afloat for much long.

How much businesses do bother to actually buy new hardware to run Aix or HP-UX on it?

Sun had a chance with OpenSolaris and they blew it with terrible community management. The fact that they wanted OpenSolaris to be Solaris Next with minimum to no changes posed a serious conflict with community contributions. If they had followed the Fedora/RHEL strategy things would have been different but there always that mistrust of external contributions (e.g. nobody outside Sun/Oracle could build the thing properly, let alone the binary blobs issue).

We had hundreds of OpenSolaris servers and nobody could say that in 2008-2010 they weren't the best we had for a NAS server. Linux and BSD didn't come close to having anything resembling SMF/ZFS/etc... nowadays it's a different story, I'd pick FreeBSD any day for a NAS appliance.

Over illumos?

I haven't followed Illumos lately. At the time we evaluated it and its community and it didn't seem worth it (keep in mind we were deeply depressed about anything Solaris). Maybe it's thriving today? I wouldn't know. I started using FreeBSD around 2000-2001 and so there's a personal bias there too.

From what I've heard, illumos has quite a strong community now. The events surrounding OpenSolaris caused an exodus from Oracle, and everyone landed either in illumos or in FreeBSD.

These days development of ZFS is done as OpenZFS with members of FreeBSD, illumos and ZoL. DTrace development mostly happens in illumos.

All of the above comes from second-hand experience based on what I've heard from the folks at Joyent (now part of Samsung) such as bcantrill. I have only played with FreeBSD and illumos and read through some of the code.