I've worked at Oracle in an engineering (not management) position, and I've seen the (tail end) of the way they interact with acquisitions. I tend to be somewhat guarded about talking about it -- I don't see a benefit to me badmouthing a former employer. But, I'll be open and honest for this comment.

The analogy I use to describe Oracle is that they're this kind of massive lumbering beast that just lays around and occasionally swallows other companies alive and whole. Then those companies run around inside, burning existing customer good will for a while until Oracle finishes digesting them or generating whatever news-reports or vendor lock-in they wanted in the first place. Then Oracle goes out to find another company to eat.

I saw a slow movement with my particular department away from developing useful software towards, "just keep on releasing things, just keep on trying to figure out what looks good at trade shows, just keep the department moving forward like a zombie while it gets eaten away and resources get shifted to new acquisitions and lawyers and salespeople." The software wasn't even a secondary concern, it was just a very minor part of the company that happened on the side. Writing code was a side-effect of the business, our real business was sales and grand promises and multi-year contracts that everyone was going to regret.

As a developer that wants to build products that actually help businesses and users, it felt really, really bad -- and my impression interacting with other parts of the business and other departments felt the same. Like they were just kind of lumbering on, that they existed because a few companies were locked in or were still buying them, and a few more dollars could be extracted before they starved to death or until their staff was fully absorbed into new projects.

I won't go into any more specific detail than that; for better or worse I feel like I have some responsibility to be a little vague. But by the time I left I was convinced that any company Oracle bought or any project it maintained was doomed as soon as they touched it. It's one of the reasons I won't work with Java -- I just don't want to tie myself to a technology that's owned by a company like that.

The current case with Sun is to me perfectly in character with the company. Oracle bought Sun, killed everything that made it Sun, and now their lawyers are out trying to extract every last penny they can get out of its mostly rotted corpse, all under the guise of 'protecting their investment' or whatever.

I'm very cynical on Oracle now, and I wasn't even at the company very long. Since moving on I've been able to work on industry-scale software that's actually being designed for customers and that actually cares about helping them accomplish business goals. It's a massive breath of fresh air that I'm still grateful for to this day. It makes a huge difference to be able to get up in the morning and feel like there's an actual reason you're going to work beyond buying Ellison a new yacht.