A Brief History of Sun

“Yesterday, I wrote in a comment that indeed Sun’s performance
in 2003 in signing the agreement with SCO, highlighted in the trial
testimony, was making it look really bad. The motive in doing it
seemed to me to be not just to open source Solaris but to also
hobble Linux and promote a competitive product instead, and in the
ugliest way possible. And then, when they had to power to stand up
to SCO and protect Linux end users, they failed to do so.

“Yesterday, I noted that there has been a change in management,
and the guy who signed that agreement is gone. On the other hand,
they still offer OpenSolaris as a competing product. On the third
hand, no one showed up at trial to testify for SCO. So the real
question I was asking was, has Sun changed? After all, Microsoft
talks a lot about openness and such, but they fail to convince me
that they wouldn’t kill and eat my cat if they thought there was
money in it. Ethics is the real value add to FOSS, you know. It’s
the one thing Microsoft can’t embrace, extend and extinguish. The
hovering doubt in my mind was, did Sun benefit from the SCO assault
on Linux? Did they intend it? Is it all still playing out as they
hoped? Clearly SCO’s attack failed, but no one predicted that. So,
other than that, what exactly is the answer to my question…?”

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