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

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.