Those of you who have been whining about Sun not being a great open source player, and calling for it’s demise, will now most likely get to know who the big bad wolf really is.
As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for.

Funny thing that now that Solaris, Java, MySQL, Netbeans, OpenOffice, Virtualbox, etc. are in murky waters, everyone seems to realize all the nice things Sun brought to the playground and how Sun wasn’t really a bad player after all… lol.

R.I.P Sun, you will be missed.

Have you ever thought in other direction – If it was not for Linux/OSS people like you would never had got a chance to easy/accessible UNIX and that if it wasn’t for Linux/OSS most of the inventions in the R&D departments of Sun and IBM would have remained behind the closed doors in this full-of-patent-wars type dog-eat-dog competitive environment? Do you not think UNIX would have been cornered into a little known, rarely used entity if it wasn’t for OSS to keep the interest and efforts in UNIX alive?

Sure we need corporations – but we need Corporations to be open, collaborative and fair – that would not have been the case if it wasn’t for OSS. So it goes both ways.

If there wasn’t any big companies that were ready to invest large sums of money in the dev of systems that they don’t always make a lot of money from, and that yes, often run over time and over budget, then Unix may never even have been invented. In more specific terms, if AT&T hadn’t financed the R&D departement that was bell labs, then who’s to say if there would have ever been UNIX (even if there would have been something else most likely), and of course, no Unix = no Linux adaptation of it down the road.

The “posix” open/free/whatever “community” things of today are “only” heavy refinements of what was initiated by a big corporation in it’s time, and saying that AT&T was a big corporation in it’s time is a real understatement. It may be fashionable to spit in the soup, but it sure edges on the verge of denial considering where “posix” originated from.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the “community” things are not of great importance, and bring a lot of new interesting developments to everything they set their eyes on, the are and they do, a testimony to that is that the big companies are integrating in their own stuff what comes out of the “communities”.

But what have been the brand new “system philosophies” (and please, Linux may have brought new things, but fundamentally, it’s Unix all over again, which is not surprising since that’s basicaly what it set out to do), or major breakthroughs (MAJOR), that have come out of the “community” initiatives ? I can’t think of any.
They have all be refinements, or variations, or whatever you want to call them, of developments and ideas initiated by big companies through their R&D departments.
And in a way it makes sense.. paradoxically a community initiative looks for gratification to a certain extent, and doing some sort of fundamental research, or system exploration from scratch, that may or may not end up giving something useful (for one Unix there have been a lot of long forgotten experiments in those big company R&D departments) won’t gather the community enthusiasm of something you know will be useful immediately.

If i wanted to be flamed I would even push it to say there are probaby a lot more groundbreaking computing things being explored in microsoft’s (and others’, hopefully suns’ and ibms’ too) R&D depaterments today than in the Linux, whatever flavor of unix, “communities”. Not even to speak of the 100% money making/marketing outfits like RedHat that don’t even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence as IBM, Sun, or even Microsoft. lol (nothing against redhat, just being the devil’s advocate here, but.. does RedHat even have a real R&D department ?).

I just thought there needed to be a post like this in this “communities rule and need nobody else” thread.

So among your alternatives, I’d say that right now, they’re _not_ selling the
OS (at least for smaller systems), but to some degree or another, they’re doing
all the rest.

They did sell the OS at one time; but that was probably more than 10 years
ago.

IMO where their history is mixed is in effectively _communicating_ what they’re
doing. I _think_ they’ve gotten the message that even if big iron is where the
big markups are, that desktops and universities are the mindshare that
provides tomorrow’s customers; there’s certainly been a lot of improvements
on that front. That doesn’t preclude them from doing silly things in the future,
but since there were alternative distros not long after they opened up
enough of the code. Now, there’s even at least one that at least aspires to
being commercial (the unlimited version of Nexenta). So at least on x86,
development needn’t strictly depend on Sun, although I think they’d have
to stray pretty far before it would be practical for someone else to try to fork.