Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nvm0n1 1055 days ago
Maybe that approach to licensing is why Sun ran out of money and had to sell itself?
2 comments

Sun has its lunch eaten by Linux and commodity hardware. Selling proprietary UNIX and super expensive hardware was a great business until Linux and (comparatively) cheap Intel boxes were good enough for more and more customers.
I doubt VirtualBox was even a line item on Sun's financials, so I really doubt that had anything to do with their failure.
What I meant is, a lackadaisical approach to billing and asking for money was common at Sun for everything software related, same thing for Java which was definitely a line item.
Hardware was Sun's revenue model.

Cost of revenue for penny-ante fluff would have been orders of magnitude greater than actual revenue. Goodwill and other benefits substantively greater.

Blaming Sun's demise on Virtualbox largess is ludicrous on its face.