[ethbr0]

It was a weird time.

Now, there's a straightforward business case and examples of the many strategic and financial benefits of owning development and guidance of an open platform.

Then... you either owned a platform completely (closed) or didn't (someone else owned it). Vis: all the bs machinations around proprietary Unix distributions.

Sun + Microsoft was likely seen more in the context of "ceding ownership to Microsoft" than "growing the platform, that we still have majority ownership of."

Ultimately, hardware vs platforms thinking. Or my-share-of-zero-sum vs growing-the-market. Unfortunate.