They didn't. They extended the life for eight more years and still make a profit from Sun hardware sales today. If you looked at the alternatives: IBM or stay independent then those were not going to end well. Oracle gave Sun life for eight more years.
Oracle was the best think to happen to Sun in 2010. You have to understand the market dynamics at UNIX vendors at that point. Look around. There are zero UNIX server vendors any more.
Mostly they have a sustaining team, just like Oracle. Solaris is still supported but purely in a payed sustaining mode for legacy customers until 2034.
Oracle bought Sun because they wanted MySQL. To me, it looks like they noticed everything else in their portfolio only after they bought it.
“Oops. We accidentally bought a CPU design, a complete enterprise OS, a virtual machine, an Office suite and quite a handful of other things. Let’s just pretend we didn’t.”
And now, Solaris has, in fact, died, other projects have left ‘Orrible before it was too late. It’s all over and gone because Oracle bought it and does not care.
(One could debate whether keeping Java alive was a good thing.)
Solaris licenses are still being sold, then again, Oracle hatters tend to like free beer instead of understanding how to keep lights on a running business.
Can we stop blaming every bullshit on Oracle? Every company is just a paperclip-machine optimizing for money (after a not too big size). They will all chop off your hand if you stick it inside without second thought.
Kindness, or care from a company only means that pretending that emotion towards something is financially better than not caring, or eradicating that something.
