Apple buying Sun would have been a disaster. Oracle at least needed some (arguably most) of what Sun made - Apple did not and do not. Apple would have killed J

Apple buying Sun would have been a disaster. Oracle at least needed some (arguably most) of what Sun made - Apple did not and do not. Apple would have killed Java in half a second. They don't need it, it was built to do the opposite of what they want their tech to do. Same for Solaris, burdensome duplicate. As for all the desktop-oriented FOSS projects (OpenOffice, VirtualBox etc), they would not have just been killed - Apple would have viciously bullied anyone to preclude them from forking them. The stuff they'd keep (MySql, probably), they would have made osx-only, and then strangled them quietly after they got out of the server game. They would have ripped anything technologically interesting from the hardware divisions and then shut them down - because they were no match, in terms of supply efficiency and value, for the Apple equivalents; and anyway they were never seriously interested in the server space. Oracle did what Oracle does, and realistically the culture clash was never going to result in a smooth transition; but from a commercial perspective they kept around the best of what Sun was making (Java, servers) and largely let the community get on with the stuff they weren't interested in (if rebranded/forked). The only real crime they committed, IMHO, was trying too hard to make money from VirtualBox, effectively spooking the market; there is a different timeline where VBox ends up being what Docker became. But everything else was par for the course.