Propietary Unix'es (essentially single platform) were on their way out anyway.
It just became too much work for Sun to both develop further their Sparc/UltraSparc platforms AND the O/S for them (Solaris), when PC workstations and servers with Linux outsold those.
As far as I know only IBM still holds out with their AIX Unix for high-end machines, but even they have a Linux version available on their zSeries family.

I don't believe charging for support like RHEL does is wrong - it is within their rights (GPL) to do so. They contribute back via Fedora so that's fine. If I choose to purchase RHEL, I can if I want.

I just lump Oracle in with Microsoft because although they aren't as prolific as Microsoft in "embrace, extend, extinguish", they have done some of that. I don't like that they bought VirtualBox so I quit using it and use qemu-kvm. I was never a Solaris user so I am sure the purchase and assassination of Solaris upset long time Solaris users/admins.

They do charge for JRE support but only for legacy versions. I don't see them charging for JREs in general because too much runs on Java. And is the fact we have openjdk make Oracle's ownership of Java moot?

Thank you for the detailed and clear reply my friend. I'll listen to you because you seem kind of an expert

That's your choice, of course, but in my opinion their treatment of VB has been very good:
- it is still completely FOSS
- it is well maintained, newer releases targetting the newest kernels are created reasonably quick
- it is not especially geared to their own products (although Oracle Linux is mentioned first)
- they make Debian and Ubuntu packages available as well as openSUSE
- they even have an "all distribution" package, for those of us that do not use rpm or deb
- there are versions for Windows, OS X and Solaris hosts too
They do not charge for any of this

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