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.
Hudson (now Jenkins)
JavaEE 8 (delayed, uncertainity around at least one JCP. Really poor communication.)
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.