
No Loss at All
I can only guess.... but I think that exactly this broken SUN culture is the reason for these departures. At Oracle, you have to demonstrate your ability to contribute to profitability, not just create some interesting stuff that will make software engineers notice.
Oracle is the leader in the database domain; it is highly profitable and that is what business is all about. Maybe not if your company is the Stanford University Network and your employees are students. Except that SUN people were no longer students and demanded a proper monthly payment.
Decisionmakers don't want to do business with losers, they rather buy a pricy product from a highly profitable business, knowing that some of their money goes into these profits. That is because a healthy company with fat on the ribs will be around in five years time.
I don't have the slightest doubt that for all former SUN products things will now only improve. Probably the time of the free lunch will be over, but that's OK. You don't get a lot of free stuff from Microsoft, yet they sell lots of it.
The rational thing to do would be to immediately dump SPARC and go for x86. But I am sure Larry will get on top of all this very soon and he will not need any of those S.U.N. academics to do that. Instead he will make sure good engineering, marketing and sales will create products that can make DOLLARS.