Say it with me, and remember: NetBeans was made open source, and is governed by the "NetBeans Community" -- Sun is the project SPONSOR, but NOT the project OWNER. Oracle can't do diddly squat about NetBeans (and probably wouldn't want to anyway).

If Oracle doesn't want to fund NetBeans, that's fine. Someone else will. Even if nobody does, there will still be forks, and other companies will pick up the slack and offer their own branded versions. Hell, even if that DOESN'T happen, as long as we have the source code we can recompile it for any platform that exists in the future. NetBeans is relatively agnostic about Java versions, as long as you have a working JDK you can direct NetBeans at.

What are you all so worried about? Oracle might as well try to kill the wind. This goes equally for any other open source project Sun had its fingers in. That's the whole POINT of open source.

Oh, and by the way, this goes out to any Eclipse fanboys who happen to be wandering by: Oracle has it's own IDE, JDeveloper, which is better than Eclipse and almost as good as NetBeans. Oracle is NOT going to support Eclipse over JDeveloper. Maybe you should kiss Eclipse goodbye!

Almost everything good related to Java is OPEN SOURCE, and has already been GPL'ed. If Oracle wanted to make it proprietary, they arrived late to the party and the hostess has already gotten drunk and shacked up with hackers.

You can't unring a bell.