They started heading down that road when they developed Java... because when the rest of the industry outpaced Sun's hardware performance, Java made it easier t

They started heading down that road when they developed Java... because when the rest of the industry outpaced Sun's hardware performance, Java made it easier to get their software off of Sun's platform. And the didn't really do all that good a job of monetizing Java, maybe because they thought that it would make it easier for people to develop on their PC's and migrate to Sun servers? BTW, as an aside, it seems to me that MS is to some extent following that route; there have been an increasing number of projects using various dotNET technologies cropping up in the open-source community over the years. Unless the trend has changed in the last year or so, most of them have been based on Mono rather than MS' implementation.