Sun Microsystems cannot ignore the open source community, and the open source community cannot ignore Sun. While Sun’s history with open source is slightly checkered, the times do seem to be a changin’.
It’s been an interesting couple of years for Sun Microsystems. In the fall of 1999 Java was slated to become a European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) standard, Solaris cost $700 a pop, and the company’s Chief Scientist, Bill Joy, was telling Linux Magazine that the GNU General Public License (GPL), “just doesn’t solve my business problems.” A year later Solaris was free, Java was not, and Sun had not only released the largest single whack of GPL code in history, it had also coughed up $1.3 billion to acquire a Linux company.
What Happened?
Conventional wisdom credits Sun with winning the Unix wars by virtue of its most significant and intangible asset — something financial analysts call “focus.” Throughout the last half of the 1990s, Sun Microsystems prided itself on having the simplest product line of the Unix vendors. While competitors like HP and IBM struggled with their multi-OS, multi-hardware strategies, Sun became the platform of choice for the new generation of Internet-enabled applications, branding itself as the “dot in dot-com.” The strategy worked, in part, because inside that dot was a single microprocessor platform, the UltraSPARC, and a single operating system, Solaris. Focus.
However, focus will only get you so far in the hi-tech industry, and in September 2000 Sun surprised everyone by announcing plans to acquire server appliance manufacturer Cobalt Systems. Suddenly the dot had some company. Cobalt’s product line featured…
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