This makes sense. Most non-"enterprise" distributions have moved on to OpenJDK 7; however, some enterprise applications, or web applets, actually do depend on JDK 6, so someone needs to continue maintaining the OpenJDK-based version of that.

True. I maintain a Windows virtual machine on Linux just to be able to use banking sites that require Java. the sites don't seem to ever work on Linux, even with the proprietary Java libraries installed.

This is usually for fairly pathetic reasons - in my experience many of the java libraries used for banking are low quality and have hard coded "C:\" paths and other insanities.