For all of the evils they released into the world, Sun Microsystems was a decent company and made decent products. Sure, they had a few failures along the way, but who can hate a company that makes something called Happy Meal Ethernet? I still love my sun4u box and some of my favourite Unix-isms come from Solaris (like NFS and automounting).
But after their merger with Oracle, I lost all respect for them. Obviously I wasn't the only one, with projects like LibreOffice and OpenIndiana opening up soon after the merger was announced. But I'd like to explain a little more on why I personally feel like Sunacle isn't Sun, and never will be.
First of all, it is a rare occasion to merge Big Company with Big Company and not get Giant Company. And to people like me who actually know how these things work, Giant Company is much, much worse than Big Company. Sun didn't even act the part of Big Company, for the most part. They did many Good Things™, like opening the source to a major portion of Solaris and StarOffice. But it's more than that. They had a culture of being Unix geeks. Pure unadulterated Unix geekiness. This is not something Oracle is known for. In fact Oracle is known for being quite the opposite with their Enterprise Middleware and Enterprise Database and Enterprise Screw-You-In-The-Butt and even Enterprisey Enterprise Enterpriseware. I'm not saying that such things are completely useless, but they're completely useless okay I said it. It's one thing to have "enterprisey" features but they make their entire business out of being just that. And it's completely pathetic and doesn't actually help anyone, it just makes everyone's lives hell, and that's not what software and computers are supposed to do.
Secondly, look at Solaris 11 Express. I've installed it on my Ultra 60 and it's a piss poor example of an OS but a stellar example of why I hate this merger. They've taken every reason I use Solaris and deprecated it. Xsun: Deprecated. The bloody 4u architecture: Deprecated. Non-Java-enabled desktop: Deprecated. If it weren't for the automounter and the fact it is the fastest modern Unix for the Ultra 60, I'd've uninstalled it by now.
For another great example, try to install Sun
Solaris Studio 12.2 on Solaris 11. It isn't even compatible.
Yet you can't install it on Solaris 10 because it's too old. So,
you have to install it on...some weird-arse cryptic BFU build
that nobody outside Oracle has. I ended up extracting the JAR
files that Studio 12 came in, then extracted the packages, then
manually installed them using good old install(1). It sucked,
and was a laborious process, but was worth it to be able to, you
know, compile things on my Sun without using FSF's little stepchild
of a compiler collection.
The only good thing that came out of this merger was the fact that MySQL is probably destined to die. Good riddance.