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I always found it amusing that Sun systems were lumped in with other Unix vendors and called "proprietary": it used IEEE-1496 SBus, IEEE 1275 OpenBoot, and the

I always found it amusing that Sun systems were lumped in with other Unix vendors and called "proprietary": it used IEEE-1496 SBus, IEEE 1275 OpenBoot, and the SPARC architecture could be licensed by anyone (Fujitsu, Tadpole, etc), and later CPU designs were released under the GPL.

teddyh 6y ago
IIRC, OpenBoot was not called OpenBoot, nor was it open, until long after Sun started using it. The same was the case for the SPARC processors; the GPL relase was the classic last-ditch efforts of a failing business. Sun, had they succeeded, would almost certainly have stayed as closed as possible.
- throw0101a 6y ago
  IEEE 1275 was published in 1994 AFAICT, which was when Sun was still robust. Sbus/IEEE 1496 was published in 1993 (though the first Sun's started using it in 1989). Before that Sun used VMEbus for their Motorola 68000-based systems. SPARC was licensed starting in the early 1990s as well: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#SPARC_architecture_licensees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#SPARC_architecture_licen... You could buy Tadpole's SPARC portable in 1992: * http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbook-3/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbo... While GPLing was late in the game, non-Sun SPARC OEMs were available for decades. You can still buy SPARC servers from Fujitsu it seems.
rst 6y ago
Sun used open standards when they suited their purpose, but they also tried for proprietary lock-in. Their alternatives to X Windows, for instance, had licenses that weren't open in any real sense. And sometimes they tried to have it both ways -- licensing Java, for example, in ways that seemed to allow for third party adaptations and implementations, and then playing games with access to the Java TCK (the test suite) to try to prevent the Apache group from actually shipping the alternate implementation they'd developed (Apache Harmony) -- see, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to_obtain_a_TCK_license_from_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to... Sun was better than some of the other vendors at generating "open" buzz for themselves, but it wasn't really clear to me at the time, nor is it now, that they were better at actually being open than, say, DEC.

teddyh 6y ago

IIRC, OpenBoot was not called OpenBoot, nor was it open, until long after Sun started using it. The same was the case for the SPARC processors; the GPL relase was the classic last-ditch efforts of a failing business. Sun, had they succeeded, would almost certainly have stayed as closed as possible.

throw0101a 6y ago
IEEE 1275 was published in 1994 AFAICT, which was when Sun was still robust. Sbus/IEEE 1496 was published in 1993 (though the first Sun's started using it in 1989). Before that Sun used VMEbus for their Motorola 68000-based systems. SPARC was licensed starting in the early 1990s as well: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#SPARC_architecture_licensees https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC#SPARC_architecture_licen... You could buy Tadpole's SPARC portable in 1992: * http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbook-3/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/32324/Tadpole-SPARCbo... While GPLing was late in the game, non-Sun SPARC OEMs were available for decades. You can still buy SPARC servers from Fujitsu it seems.

rst 6y ago

Sun used open standards when they suited their purpose, but they also tried for proprietary lock-in. Their alternatives to X Windows, for instance, had licenses that weren't open in any real sense. And sometimes they tried to have it both ways -- licensing Java, for example, in ways that seemed to allow for third party adaptations and implementations, and then playing games with access to the Java TCK (the test suite) to try to prevent the Apache group from actually shipping the alternate implementation they'd developed (Apache Harmony) -- see, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to_obtain_a_TCK_license_from_Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Harmony#Difficulties_to... Sun was better than some of the other vendors at generating "open" buzz for themselves, but it wasn't really clear to me at the time, nor is it now, that they were better at actually being open than, say, DEC.