4 ms·

I think Sun might have wanted to sue Google? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951407 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10951407

• sonnyblarney 7y ago
  Yes, thanks for that, it stirred my recollection as I actually bumped into Jon Swartz by accident just in that era. I don't think it was money, so much as the established culture at Sun (i.e. James Gosling: "Sun is not so much a company but a debating society). A more aggressive CEO/leadership/culture would have maybe raised the money to take on Google, or to take another tact. So while you are right - and thanks for the reference - the issue here is what Sun was about, vs. what Oracle is about.
  • jacques_chester 7y ago
    I've been saying for years that Pivotal Labs is a debating club that produces code as a by-product. But now I'm wondering if I read the Gosling quip and then forgot I had.
  • pron 7y ago
    Whatever Sun was "about", sadly, it didn't work, and damaged some excellent technologies, like Java and Solaris, that Sun couldn't invest a lot of resources into because it no longer had them. Oracle managed to save one of them and make it thrive. Sun, as a big, impactful company, was a product of the dot-com bubble. It certainly made more lasting contributions than other bubble-era companies, but its strategy couldn't survive the crash. Maybe great ideas can be born in companies like Sun but need companies like Oracle to sustain.