[smart_jackal]

Sun's main issue was that they failed to capitalize on all the wonderful tech they had including Java, VirtualBox and Openoffice/StarOffice. Even after open sourcing all of them, they could have kept the company running by marketing to enterprises and offering support.

If they had learned these skills from companies like RH/SUSE/IBM, then Java would have been in much better hands today.

[pjmlp]

First of all, Oracle and IBM have been part of Java world since the early days with their own Java implementations, and Oracle even jumped on Sun's boat regarding those Java based thin client workstations that were all the rage around 1998.

Secondly, with Sun you would never had gotten AOT, because they saw it as something that 3rd party vendors like Oracle and IBM should care about, they were fully into "JIT or bust", and MaximeVM would have followed the same path as SPOTs, instead of turning into GraalVM.