Solaris could have lived on, I'm still not quite sure about Sun, moving from the hardware market to just software would have killed them had Oracle bought them.

Solaris could have lived on, I'm still not quite sure about Sun, moving from the hardware market to just software would have killed them had Oracle bought them. I believe Vendor Lock in is what keeps Sparc alive. As far as BK - I work on a similarly specialized software product as a hobby, a friend of mine owns it, and I've advocated a bunch of times for open source - in the end support contracts I think would end up being as much money as we currently get out of licensing, with the added benefit of the ease of adding developers, but its his baby, and he cant give it up.