Jesus, Tim. I just finished yelling at some other paranoid nutcase for
blaming this on sun/oracle. Sit down, and listen.
Oracle hasn't bought sun YET. The SEC would get rather extremely
concerned if oracle has already been telling sun to deep-six a bunch
of FOSS competition, and has apparently done so a while ago, because
stuff like this doesn't happen overnight. Also, considering that
oracle can't get their hands on sun until the EU clears it, and if
there's any hint of official communication by oracle to sun to kill
off FOSS-based competition to oracle projects, well, think about it.
THEY WOULD BE SUNK.
The EU would sit there, smugly say: Ha! Told you so, veto to the deal,
and make clear no amount of political pressure is going to change this
answer. This, or even an investigation if that happened, would cost
oracle hundreds of millions of dollars. Most assuredly more than
whatever sales oracle would lose in the few months that it'll take for
the oracle/sun deal to go through now, at which point they can axe
whatever projects they want.
So, no, oracle did not sabotage SOA, UML, and the visual web plugins.
Duh.
Secondly, these plugins did exist, and they are open source. If there
is truly such financial benefit in these products, then why, exactly,
aren't the businesses that rely on them putting in some funds and a
programmer or two to maintain these plugins? All they'd have to do is
maintain existing code. It's not as bad as having to start from
scratch. A post on the netbeans forum (check other thread for link)
clearly shows that if anybody else puts in the effort of maintaining
these plugins, odds are they'll find a place in the master
distributions, or at the very least, they'd get whatever help they
needed from Team Netbeans. Team Netbeans has also been adding J2EE6
support to netbeans, which i'm sure competes with oracle stuff as
well. The fact that you cannot see that this ISNT some sort of
powerplay is mind boggling to me.