Solaris was the development OS for Oracle for years. I presume that's now shifted to their own linux distro but for many years that was the case, to the point that if you were a serious Oracle customer you ran it on Solaris (and Sun hardware) because all the bug fixes and updates came out first for that platform.
So from that standpoint it makes sense that they acquired it. They probably just didn't care about any non-Oracle users.
Not doing another major release of doesn't exactly rule out keeping it as the reference platform for their core database product.
I guess my question - I honestly have no idea and it's been years since I paid attention to Oracle or Sun's inner workings - is whether they're still developing SPARC hardware? The Google seems to say no, they've abandoned that... so I'm inclined to agree with you guys now.
I don't have a ton of nostalgia left for Sun stuff, but still... what a waste.
Their core reference platform moved from SPARC to Linux + X86 almost a decade ago. They pushed Exadata down everyone's throat at the time with their "it'd be too bad if we have to audit you unless you buy this new hardware" approach.
I'm endlessly surprised that Oracle has enough customers to support them. I was familiar with the reasoning a long time ago but so many of those same users have moved on to SQL Server or open source stuff.
