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A Brief History of Sun by Groklaw's grouch - Updated

By Pamela Jones et al.

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?

Groklaw member grouch took my question seriously, and he researched and compiled a list of all the Groklaw articles since we began. At that point, he says, he needed to go no further, because it was obvious there has been a change.

No matter where you stand on my question, I think it's useful to have as a handy list. I pointed the finger at Sun back in 2003, and it turns out I was exactly right. So all you guys who attacked me for saying that Sun was playing an ugly game can send me apology emails now. : )

But fair is fair. If there has been a change, I need to highlight that too. Whether their journey is complete is another question, but grouch's research shows the trajectory very clearly.

Full post as published by Groklaw on May 06, 2008 (boomark / email).