Link to full articleAccording to Phipps, Andresen saw the writing on the wall for Sun's middleware, such as the Open Web Single Sign-On (SSO) Project, also known as OpenSSO. Sun started OpenSSO Enterprise in 2008, with OpenSSO Express available for users as a community version. Andresen believed that projects like this would not long be for this world within an Oracle environment. He also believed that such a move would be a waste, as there was room for much growth in this and other Sun middleware offerings.
It turns out Andresen was prescient. ForgeRock got started on February 1 and by February 24, OpenSSO Express was pulled from Oracle's download site, with little to no explanation. ForgeRock, which has already started a downstream repository for OpenSSO, was left with little choice but to fork the code into a new project, OpenAM and become the new upstream project.
The owners kill the software you rely on? With proprietary you are stuck. With Open Source anyone can start up a project/company to support it.