Of the companies, Oracle is the only one who has ever made really LARGE acquisitions and made them work. It will be interesting to see what Oracle does when they need to start spinning off the different tools that duplicate their functionality. Oracle has been dev friendly with free tools and development environments. You can download their enterprise Oracle database from their website. IBM always seems to charge for their tools.
My experience has been the opposite. Yes, you can get Oracle XE on a limited set of platforms (still no OS X support for any current Oracle databases), for free, although the default configs leave a lot to be desired. However that doesn't compare to the large number of free and/or open source Java projects, libraries, tech articles, forums, etc... that IBM has supported. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/java/.
You also need a registered account to do pretty much anything on Oracle's site, in stark contrast to IBM's developer tools and sites.
Also if Oracle's SQL Developer is them being friendly to devs, then I wish they wouldn't:) That thing is one of the ugliest, most prone to crash, DB tools I've ever used.
Which just came out on the 9th of April I think, which is how many years late? Also, it doesn't appear to install correctly unless you're running OS X Server. Fine for production, useless for doing development on my laptop with.
Eclipse, that was (one of) the best Java IDE when I was still in Javaland, was originally an IBM project that they've released as open-source and they've been a major contributor to it afterwards. So IBM doesn't always charge for their tools.
Thinking about these large acquisitions, it's hard to imagine that Oracle now owns Solaris, Java, BEA, Seibel, Peoplesoft, MySQL and of course their own Oracle DB.
Its now about "cost-free" tools. The open source community can produce those -- if anything, Eclipse/NetBeans could just be extended with more plugins.
Its about open specifications and standards. Sun had been hyping Java 7, but hasn't been going through the Java Community Process to "debug" the spec, and allow for OSS developers (like those at IBM) to develop spec-compliant tools of their own. If Oracle continues down that trend, it will see Java lose its most important asset: a community of developers who believe in open standards.
