[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.

[monocasa]

> It was a free download for decades before being open sourced.

And it was always the support contracts even more than the hardware sales that kept them going. Starting to nickel and dime for software licenses too wasn't an option on the table for them.