Simon,
It has to do with enterprise users who contribute resources. The people who are currently contributing to develop, test, and release OpenACS are not using Oracle.
If there were resources to keep Oracle support up to date, there would not be an issue of dropping it, but rarely is there a large volunteer or commercially supported effort to do so.
Don Baccus has pretty much been doing all the Oracle testing on his personal server, and I'll let him explain more about how that affects the future of Oracle support if he wants to.
So, if Oracle support for OpenACS is important for your business, please let us know by showing your support. Right now we haven't seen many of the users who "require" Oracle support for OpenACS stepping up to actually maintain that support.
Someone suggested before that Oracle support could become a seperate branch of OpenACS, to be maintained and released on a seperate schedule from PostgreSQL. If someone volunteered to manage that, it seems like a possibility. That would allow the PostgreSQL support and release of OpenACS to move at the pace appropriate for the level of volunteer effort, while Oracle support could move at it's own pace, supported by the users of OpenACS that still require Oracle support.
So Simon, 5 hobbyists (which really isn't a good term, almost all the contributors are working either academically or commerically supporting OpenACS on PostgreSQL), that actually show up and contribute are worth many "enterprise" Oracle users who do not contribute. It would seem that the enterpise users would have even more resources to contribute than a few small companies and a handful of volunteers.
