Anyone decrying Oracle as "evil" is falling into a trap that I have warned about[1]: they are making the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison -- they are infusing Oracle with humanity that it does not in fact have. Oracle is, as another commenter put it, a corporate sociopath. The inability to empathize is fine for a monopolist (and indeed, it's a terrific asset -- and after five months of working there, I concluded that it's the only thing that I think Oracle has any real talent for), but it's terrible for a technology company. In particular, the inability for Oracle to see anyone other than themselves leads to decisions that don't just erode trust, they destroy it beyond all repair. What you are seeing here are the costs of Oracle's decisions: it's what Oracle did to Hudson, to MySQL, to Java and to OpenSolaris. If you honestly don't understand that -- if you truly believe in your heart that the dismissal of Oracle is somehow merely Occupy-esque anti-corporate sentiment -- then you yourself probably have an inability to empathize that should bode very well for your future career at Oracle.
You're awesome. I watched the full vid of that talk a month ago or so and it really hammered home what matters.
What we do as developers matters. Our time on this world is short enough already. What reason is there to spend years of our lives to further the aims of a company that doesn't share our goals and hopes, and in the end may be acting completely opposite to what we believe is fair and honest competition? What a waste...
Looking forward to seeing more and more of the OpenSolaris/SmartOS/Lumiere innovation spread to the rest of the community now that Oracle has caused everyone to jump ship. In some really cool technical ways SmartOS is really advanced, but the usability definitely needs work... things should improve as more people start hammering on it. Would be good to see more cooperation/coordination between SmartOS & Linux distros.
It depends on what you mean by "significantly diverge." If you mean "innovate", then yes -- absolutely. We already have tons of evidence of differentiated innovation in illumos[1][2][3] -- none of which can be brought back into Solaris.[4]
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc#t=33m0s