Broadcom is just private equity buying products to bleed dry. Nobody thinks VMware is the future, but the folks that use it are enterprises with deep pockets who are slow and reluctant to change so you can multiply the price by big numbers and get paid big while your dying acquired product meets its end.

VMware's lock on enterprise virtualization simultaneously made it essentially impossible for anyone else to compete like-for-like using a different platform and probably also doomed VMware's attempt to start pivoting to containers.

We were pretty successful moving to proxmox. They dont have the support some companies want but xcpng does. There are half decent options out there for corp use.

There are. I worked for a company that had a good KVM-based enterprise virtualization alternative with support. But they never had great commercial success with it displacing VMware. I understand they're having a lot more luck with a kubevirt-based option today post Broadcom acquisition of VMware.

If you have the resources to deal with kubevirt (read you are large enough for the increased efficiency across larger installations to overcome the higher cost of kubernetes labor) it's pretty decent. There are a shocking number of sub 5 location places out there that just need 2 low end boxes to virtualize active directory, tenable or equivalent scanner and a few other things that should be choosing xcpng or maybe proxmox if they are doing the analysis rationally (lol).

Oracle.

In fairness, Oracle keeps developing JVM and Java rather nicely, and keeps it open enough. I had expected worse.

Java has a much stronger open source community with lots of corporate players. If Oracle tried to close the doors on it, everybody can pivot away in much shorter time than Vmware.

Where were all those players when Google torpedoed Sun?

The large majority of work done in OpenJDK is by Oracle employees.

Had it been for most of those players, Java 6 would have been the last version.

I don't exactly get what you mean by "Google torpedoed Sun".

Corporate players came into play after Oracle acquired Sun. The fear that Oracle would do the same as LibreOffice pushed players like IBM to have their own Java distributions.

Of course Oracle having more support for OpenJDK is not surprising. However, the open nature and existing players already make it easier to fork / replace Java compared to Vmware.

Sun did not sue Google because they already lacked the money to do so.

What Google did with Android, it is hardly any different from Microsoft with J++, only that there the courts had another outcome.

Android with a Java subset and Kotlin, is hardly any different outcome than .NET with C#.

Corporate players came in, after money was available again, after the acquisition.

"James Gosling Triangulation's Interview on Google vs. Sun"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYw3X4RZv6Y&t=3462s

"James Gosling on Android and Java"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT__Nrr3PNI&t=6245s

If Google actually cared about Java, they missed their opportunity to acquire Sun, own Java, do whatever they felt like doing with it for Android, and the rest of the industry, and best of all, they would never had to bother with any lawsuit.

Given how much the so called existing players contributed to save Java while Sun was going under, that is whishful thinking.