Sun Microsystems definitely added value, tons in fact.
Oracle's contributions are less clear-cut, particularly if you don't count all the acquired "achievements."
Oracle's contributions are less clear-cut, particularly if you don't count all the acquired "achievements."
I’d be surprised if Oracle released the trademark without a fight to the end. They have a special way of decimating open source projects.
At a couple points my org had hiring crunches and leadership’s short term solution was to find employees from other orgs that could be “loaned” to us. The quality was universally jaw-droppingly low. I had to do code reviews and they would do the craziest junior-developer no-standards stuff that would cause their PRs to get rejected repeatedly, because not only did they make dumb decisions, they didn’t even understand the explanations of why they were dumb decisions. It was infuriating and a horrible waste of time, and the second time around, we tried to say we don’t want that kind of help, but leadership insisted that the free manpower was not optional.
Evaluated by how useful they are to society at large, many businesses should not exist forever--or even for very long. Xerox PARC, Kodak, and Netscape are examples of companies (or, in PARC's case, a division of a company) that contributed significantly to their fields before becoming defunct. Those contributions aren't worsened or inferior, somehow, because the companies that engineered them are gone.
Whether or not a company is still in business only tells you whether a company is good at keeping itself alive. Over time, that quality is increasingly disconnected from whether a company produces valuable goods or services.
Had it not been for Oracle, Java would have died on version 6, and it remains to be seen what would have happened from anything else.