> I think most people feel like the Sun Microsystems products all got worse after the Oracle purchase. E.g., Solaris, Java.
Licenses apart - Java actually improved, but Oracle's name is so tainted that a lot of people ran for the hills the moment they acquired Sun. Solaris support on a lot of platforms used by my employer simply vanished within 36 months (in enterprise terms, that's instantaneous) because every customer started working on a migration/exit strategy as soon as they learned of the acquisition. Once a critical mass of customers was headed out, it got dropped as a platform by a lot of developers, and eventually Oracle itself put it on life support.
So yes, Oracle's name is THAT powerful it can kill you by association. Lawnmower story etc.
Licenses apart - Java actually improved, but Oracle's name is so tainted that a lot of people ran for the hills the moment they acquired Sun. Solaris support on a lot of platforms used by my employer simply vanished within 36 months (in enterprise terms, that's instantaneous) because every customer started working on a migration/exit strategy as soon as they learned of the acquisition. Once a critical mass of customers was headed out, it got dropped as a platform by a lot of developers, and eventually Oracle itself put it on life support.
So yes, Oracle's name is THAT powerful it can kill you by association. Lawnmower story etc.