[dbcurtis]

I suspect not legally possible. There is a lot of code in the NT kernel from various other companies that at least at one point was under NDA, and a lot probably still is.

[monocasa]

That was true of Solaris too, and they managed to work through that.

[TomMarius]

I imagine that MS could be much further down this line...

[pjmlp]

With heavy consequences for Sun's viability.

[monocasa]

Citation needed that opening Solaris had anything to do with Sun getting sold off.

[pjmlp]

It certainly did not improve sales.

I bet no one that downloaded it has spent a dime to Sun.

[monocasa]

> It certainly did not improve sales.

It was a free download for decades before being open sourced. From what I heard, it increased support contract sales quite a bit, letting companies feel that that weren't necessarily tied to Sun for Solaris, but knowing that Sun was the best outfit to support it.

> I bet no one that downloaded it has spent a dime to Sun.

You would lose that bet hard. They made their money on hardware sales and support contracts.

A family member of mine was the head of Federal Sales for Sun at the time.

[pjmlp]

I was talking about software sales and apparently those hardware sales weren't enough to keep Sun in business.

[dbcurtis]

Nah, SUN was buried under Intel's fab capacity. A big tsunami of cheap silicon rolled in -- Linux surfed it, SUN wiped out under it.