One word: Oracle.

carterehsmith · on July 20, 2016

To be fair, Oracle gives you things such as VirtualBox, MySql, Java, Netbeans etc for free. That's not too bad for an 'evil' company.

wilonth · on July 20, 2016

No it doesn't, they are made by Sun Microsystems, they are free because of Sun, not Oracle.

carterehsmith · on July 21, 2016

That's just not true.

Consider all the improvements to the above software that came after Oracle's purchase of Sun. There was a boatload of them and they keep coming. Oracle is paying for that.

They are all free, and that is because of Oracle, not because of Sun as Sun does not exist anymore.

wilonth · on July 23, 2016

Improvements? How much? They ruined OpenOffice, triggering the LibreOffice fork. They ruined MySQL, triggering the MariaDB fork. The original Sun would have done 10X better improving those things they made.

ZenoArrow · on July 20, 2016

They were project from Sun Microsystems originally, but Sun Microsystems doesn't exist anymore. Oracle have chosen to keep some of the Sun products open/free (they've closed support for others, such as OpenSolaris, which was continued through an open-source fork).