Why does it keep getting better?
They've actually been fantastic for the Java platform and have been so for nearly a decade now i.e. even before the Sun acquisition. It's hard to dispute that the JVM is thriving right now with plenty of innovation amongst the various languages. And most of us were really happy to have their JRockit work (especially G1GC) embedded back into the core runtime when they could have continued to charge for it.
And people need to ask if things are really so bad with their OSS projects e.g. OpenOffice, MySQL, DTrace etc. Sure they have tightened control over copyrights but it's not like they have actively screwed their customers if anything the projects seem in a lot better shape.
I was under the impression they contributed the code to the Apache Foundation because they didn't want to develop it further.
If I have a Mac and need to virtualize things, 'free and open source' doesn't really matter.
Moreover, Java is worth nothing without people developing in Java. They need a good IDE. Hence, Oracle needs a good IDE. Oracle surely won't complain that partners sponsor NB, since it reduces this necessary cost of doing business.
I've been pleasantly surprised by Oracle's stewardship of Java. They actually succeeded in getting the further development back on track, after it seemed to have descended into a quagmire in Sun's last years.
nothing in that list of new features jumps out at me. and in terms of javascript support it looks like things are still worse than nb7.2 (they gutted their language model because of licensing concerns and the new model is terrible). they've added some bells and whistles, but still don't have the basics working (ie, JsDocs, which provide the typing info for javascript)
http://wiki.netbeans.org/JavaScript2
so i'm still using nb7.2 (and purchased webstorm for javascript). i've been using (and loving) netbeans for 7 years, but from my pov, the project appears stalled (even though they're putting lots of work into it)
It seemed I stopped hearing about since Oracle acquisition.
Why would anyone currently pick it (if it was available) instead of picking Linux or FreeBSD?
I don't do Solaris projects since 2001, besides tweaking at home every now and then, but I would guess:
- ZFS
- containers
- DTrace
- The usual commercial UNIX stuff that is still being brought into Linux and BSD distributions, in terms of security and high availability
- Maintenance contracts (Oracle changed them though)
All the code that is using Solaris specific APIs, because like all standards, POSIX only covers partially what each UNIX system offers.