[Am-info] After Sun goes out

[Hans Reiser]

One should always judge by comparison with peers, and Sun was the most 
open and most interoperating OS vendor of their generation of vendors.

Then Linux came along, and Linux was like Sun but a lot more so.  Sun 
responded with too little too late, and lost the market.

I would have loved to have seen Sun produce SunOS for $100 for x86 back 
in the 80s, and put their company behind it.  I would have loved to have 
seen Frame Technologies get cost competitive with MS-word in the 80s/90s.

They didn't.  Now they fade away. Sigh.  Good companies both of them.


Fred A. Miller wrote:

>"Sun Microsystems crossed the line from "troubled" to "doomed" 
>yesterday. This is sad news for the open-source community, and we need 
>to think about how we're going to deal with it. The most pressing 
>questions are, "What becomes of Java?" and, "What becomes of 
>OpenOffice.org?" These are questions that matter.
>
>Sun's troubles have been mounting for a while. Founder Bill Joy's 
>departure was an ominous recent symbol, but the substance of their 
>problem is that their hugh-margin server business is being eroded from 
>the low end by PCs running Linux at a rate that doesn't leave it much 
>of a future. 
>
>Nobody should cheer the prospect of Sun's demise. Sun screwed up some 
>major decisions very badly, from wrecking Unix standardization efforts 
>in the 1980s to throttling the dream of Java ubiquity by keeping the 
>language proprietary. But nobody should forget that Sun was founded by 
>Unix hackers for Unix hackers. For most of its lifespan Sun remained 
>the archetype of an engineering-driven company. Sun was, mostly, among 
>the good guys; to hackers and geeks, disputing with Sun was almost a 
>family quarrel. 
>
>But inside Sun, I hear that talent is bailing out of the company because 
>they just don't believe the Solaris-will-prevail story management is 
>peddling. Most of Sun's techies are running Linux on their PCs at home. 
>They can see the handwriting on the wall."
>
>http://newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=03/10/02/1240243
>
>  
>


-- 
Hans