[mrbill]

Oracle totally and freely threw away every bit of goodwill that Sun had fostered over the years, when they bought the company. Chunked it in the dumpster out back, didn't care.

The "old" Sun: Encouraged hobbyist use of hardware, put out software under a "free unless you need to pay for support" term, open-sourced Solaris [1], was generous with hardware donations [2] to various organizations, and realized that if a sysadmin liked playing with Sun gear at home, they were more likely to recommend it at work.

The "new" Sun: Oracle flips everyone the bird with both hands, won't even communicate with you unless it's about a paid support contract.

[1] I was lucky to be one of the 250 people picked as the OpenSolaris test/release/publicity team; still have my "xxx of 250" poster print on the wall of my home office. [2] They gave a Netra T1 and a disk shelf to us to run the Sun-Managers mailing list with, told me to keep a review-unit T1000 to run sunhelp.org on, and sent me a loaded Ultra 10 after a bit of a "misunderstanding". These are just three examples of many, many instances. [3] http://www.sunhelp.org/letters/

[gyjvdf]

Unfortunately, the good-will didn't pay the bills

[mrbill]

Makes me wonder what would have happened if IBM had been the suitor instead of Oracle, as I saw rumored.

[rodgerd]

Someone in the know at the time claimed to me that IBMs plan was to keep the hardware and customers, and mitigate anti-trust concerns by spinning off the software to Red Hat.

Given RHs compulsive open sourcing of aquisitions it's one of the great tragedies of the software industry that IBM got cold feet over the concerns that Sun were facing violations of anti-bribery laws.

[B1FF_PSUVM]

Oracle goes for the jugular - in this case, the cheque-writing vein ...