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Oracle had already acquired Sun by the time I was in the technology industry. The respondent states that Sun is so set on giving things away. Can someone commen

Oracle had already acquired Sun by the time I was in the technology industry. The respondent states that Sun is so set on giving things away. Can someone comment on the culture of Sun at that time? Sun seems to have left a legacy in the open source community. What was the business logic on giving away the software for free? I know it's very common today, but Sun may have been a leader in open source. Any books recommendations would be appreciated too.

maveonair 4y ago
I can recommend the book “Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing”. The Author compares NeXT a lot with Sun including their business strategies. I have never thought I will learn so much about the early days of Sun by reading this book. https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/0689121350 https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/06891213...
- hbogert 4y ago
  Having listened to "oxide and friends" and "on the metal" podcasts.. next and sun were nothing alike. The above podcasts are hosted by Bryan cantrill and often has guests from that era, though the newer episodes try not to reminisce so much, because it became a bit much at some point
  - maveonair 4y ago
    Totally agree, which is the reason why I recommend the book. The author explains the difference in a great detail and by that you learn so much about Sun. …and NeXT or course :).
- pjmlp 4y ago
  In a way they got to be interwined via the OpenStep and Objective-C collaboration projects, that ironically are in the genesis of Java and also Java EE, hence why Java has so many Objective-C touch points.
ioblomov 4y ago
I started in tech in the late 90s. Here's what I recall: 1. Sun originally meant Stanford University Network and the university shared the open-source ethos of Unix along with UC Berkeley. 2. Although Microsoft was already dominant on the desktop by then, the Internet was still up for grabs. 3. And even though JavaScript shipped with Netscape (meaning almost from the beginning of the public Internet), it was still severely underpowered. 4. Java, in the form of "applets" (mini apps running on the browser), could add dynamism to HTML (CSS didn't exist yet) and so define a new software paradigm for the Internet. 5. Sun, like Apple, made money on hardware. All five factors incentivized Sun to give Java away. Java applets, although a cool demo for the time, never really went anywhere, but Java did go on to compete with Microsoft for the (enterprise) server.
Beltalowda 4y ago
Sun's business model was selling hardware: beefy workstations that you do Serious Computing™ with, unlike those wimpy home computers like PCs.[1] Later on, when x86 actually became decent and competitive they shifted to server hardware, but still: monetary units for hardware, not software. And oh yeah, with this hardware you also got this SunOS Unix thingy. SunOS was very much core to Sun's success especially in the 80s (not the least because Bill Joy was already a "big name" even before Sun on account of creating BSD and vi), but it wasn't their core business. From their perspective they weren't really "giving things away for free" because they weren't selling it. Interoperability also gave Sun advantages as their SunOS/Solaris machines could communicate with other systems so it made the barrier to adoption/migration lower. People talk about this WSL thing on Windows now, but for Windows NT and 2000 there was SFU – "Services for Unix" – which pretty much did the same thing for Microsoft: make it easier to use Windows with other systems. Microsoft in the 90s on the other hand was very much in the business of selling software. I'm not sure if they were making any hardware in the 90s (maybe some mice and keyboards?), but if they did it was a little side-thing and not their core business. Sun was never really an "open source company" in the way we would understand that now: parts were open, many parts were not. They did eventually release OpenSolaris but that was much later. This wasn't entirely Sun's choice: the legal situation at the time was complex, and even OpenSolaris wasn't 100% open due to legal reasons (see the BSDi lawsuit, or the SCO lawsuit that is hopefully finally dead once and for all). It's similar to Apple today; you can still download the source for Darwin, Swift, Safari, clang, and some other things. What does Apple have to gain by keeping these closed? It's not their core business: no one "pays" for Safari or even macOS; they pay for iPhones and AirBooks. There is still a lot of "secret sauce" at Apple – as there was at Sun – and you could argue if that really protects Apple's profits or not – but there's a wide agreement that "some openness" doesn't really hurt their bottom line. It's not a coincidence that Microsoft has become "more open" as their business model moved away from almost exclusively selling Windows, Office, and other software suites to selling Azure Cloud, Office365 subscriptions, X-Box, and other things. In short: Sun never really "gave away" things, they just had a very different business model than Microsoft. On one hand you could say that the author of the email doesn't really seem to appreciate that, but you could also say that Sun failed to foresee that their core products and business model would slowly become obsolete. This is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight, but less obvious in 1996: they had $7.1 billion revenue/$476 million net income in 1996 (Microsoft had $8.6 billion revenue and $2.2 billion income in the same year; less overhead if you distribute only software) and in 1997 this increased to $8.6 billion/$762 million. The profits continued to increase until the dot-com crash, which they recovered from only to be done in by the financial crisis. [1]: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24 https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24
giantrobot 4y ago
Giving things away is not the same as open source. Java was closed source until 2006. Sun released the Java runtime and class library for no charge but not the source. The class library's interfaces were public as was the JVM specification so there were open source Java implementations like Kaffe, gcj, and the GNU classpath before Sun open sourced Java proper. Originally Sun released the JRE (on PC/Mac/etc) at no charge but charged for licenses elsewhere. With the release of Java 1.2 (J2SE) Sun charged for releases of J2ME on devices and J2EE products like application servers. Sun wanted to get the Java runtime spread as widely as possible to make it the platform to develop stuff on. The idea was to get stuff written in Java and then deployment was just embedding a class file (later a jar) in a web page.
efficax 4y ago
JDK has always been free, microsoft would have charged a hefty license fee for the equivalent
ThrowawayR2 4y ago
IMO it was a strategic move to commoditize their complement. My impression during that era was that Scott McNealy saw Microsoft (whose strength was in software) as Sun Microsystems' (whose strength was in hardware) most important competitor and took steps to stem their influence. Java was one example of a giveaway intended to create a Sun-controlled moat to protect their business. The purchase of StarOffice and its open-sourcing as OpenOffice, which eventually begat LibreOffice, seemed to be an attempt to put a dent in Microsoft's MSOffice revenue.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Spolski argues here that it was actually backwards: they weren't commoditizing their compliment, they were commoditizing their core: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ If you sell hardware the last thing you want to do is commoditize hardware, which is what a portable software strategy does. What you want is hardware lockin. Java was the opposite of that. Sun eventually had to be sold, but Microsoft didn't.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Sun intended Java to be an uber-platform, to get it running on everything from tiny embedded systems to their giant E10k systems. They'd make money selling JVM licenses in various verticals. Sun bought into Netscape's vision of the web as the delivery platform for software. Java could run on the server side and then as applets in the browser on the client. The expansion of Java would then expand its use in places Sun wanted to charge for licenses. Java wouldn't create a moat around their hardware. It was intended to eliminate Microsoft's moat around the Windows platform. If ISVs could write software in Java that could be delivered by a browser on any OS, the actual OS stopped being important. As long as there was a browser and JVM available on a platform it could run that software.

maveonair 4y ago

I can recommend the book “Steve Jobs and the NeXT big thing”. The Author compares NeXT a lot with Sun including their business strategies. I have never thought I will learn so much about the early days of Sun by reading this book. https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/0689121350 https://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Next-Big-Thing/dp/06891213...

hbogert 4y ago
Having listened to "oxide and friends" and "on the metal" podcasts.. next and sun were nothing alike. The above podcasts are hosted by Bryan cantrill and often has guests from that era, though the newer episodes try not to reminisce so much, because it became a bit much at some point
- maveonair 4y ago
  Totally agree, which is the reason why I recommend the book. The author explains the difference in a great detail and by that you learn so much about Sun. …and NeXT or course :).
pjmlp 4y ago
In a way they got to be interwined via the OpenStep and Objective-C collaboration projects, that ironically are in the genesis of Java and also Java EE, hence why Java has so many Objective-C touch points.

ioblomov 4y ago

I started in tech in the late 90s. Here's what I recall: 1. Sun originally meant Stanford University Network and the university shared the open-source ethos of Unix along with UC Berkeley. 2. Although Microsoft was already dominant on the desktop by then, the Internet was still up for grabs. 3. And even though JavaScript shipped with Netscape (meaning almost from the beginning of the public Internet), it was still severely underpowered. 4. Java, in the form of "applets" (mini apps running on the browser), could add dynamism to HTML (CSS didn't exist yet) and so define a new software paradigm for the Internet. 5. Sun, like Apple, made money on hardware. All five factors incentivized Sun to give Java away. Java applets, although a cool demo for the time, never really went anywhere, but Java did go on to compete with Microsoft for the (enterprise) server.

Beltalowda 4y ago

Sun's business model was selling hardware: beefy workstations that you do Serious Computing™ with, unlike those wimpy home computers like PCs.[1] Later on, when x86 actually became decent and competitive they shifted to server hardware, but still: monetary units for hardware, not software. And oh yeah, with this hardware you also got this SunOS Unix thingy. SunOS was very much core to Sun's success especially in the 80s (not the least because Bill Joy was already a "big name" even before Sun on account of creating BSD and vi), but it wasn't their core business. From their perspective they weren't really "giving things away for free" because they weren't selling it. Interoperability also gave Sun advantages as their SunOS/Solaris machines could communicate with other systems so it made the barrier to adoption/migration lower. People talk about this WSL thing on Windows now, but for Windows NT and 2000 there was SFU – "Services for Unix" – which pretty much did the same thing for Microsoft: make it easier to use Windows with other systems. Microsoft in the 90s on the other hand was very much in the business of selling software. I'm not sure if they were making any hardware in the 90s (maybe some mice and keyboards?), but if they did it was a little side-thing and not their core business. Sun was never really an "open source company" in the way we would understand that now: parts were open, many parts were not. They did eventually release OpenSolaris but that was much later. This wasn't entirely Sun's choice: the legal situation at the time was complex, and even OpenSolaris wasn't 100% open due to legal reasons (see the BSDi lawsuit, or the SCO lawsuit that is hopefully finally dead once and for all). It's similar to Apple today; you can still download the source for Darwin, Swift, Safari, clang, and some other things. What does Apple have to gain by keeping these closed? It's not their core business: no one "pays" for Safari or even macOS; they pay for iPhones and AirBooks. There is still a lot of "secret sauce" at Apple – as there was at Sun – and you could argue if that really protects Apple's profits or not – but there's a wide agreement that "some openness" doesn't really hurt their bottom line. It's not a coincidence that Microsoft has become "more open" as their business model moved away from almost exclusively selling Windows, Office, and other software suites to selling Azure Cloud, Office365 subscriptions, X-Box, and other things. In short: Sun never really "gave away" things, they just had a very different business model than Microsoft. On one hand you could say that the author of the email doesn't really seem to appreciate that, but you could also say that Sun failed to foresee that their core products and business model would slowly become obsolete. This is easy to argue with the benefit of hindsight, but less obvious in 1996: they had $7.1 billion revenue/$476 million net income in 1996 (Microsoft had $8.6 billion revenue and $2.2 billion income in the same year; less overhead if you distribute only software) and in 1997 this increased to $8.6 billion/$762 million. The profits continued to increase until the dot-com crash, which they recovered from only to be done in by the financial crisis. [1]: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24 https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-06-24

giantrobot 4y ago

Giving things away is not the same as open source. Java was closed source until 2006. Sun released the Java runtime and class library for no charge but not the source. The class library's interfaces were public as was the JVM specification so there were open source Java implementations like Kaffe, gcj, and the GNU classpath before Sun open sourced Java proper. Originally Sun released the JRE (on PC/Mac/etc) at no charge but charged for licenses elsewhere. With the release of Java 1.2 (J2SE) Sun charged for releases of J2ME on devices and J2EE products like application servers. Sun wanted to get the Java runtime spread as widely as possible to make it the platform to develop stuff on. The idea was to get stuff written in Java and then deployment was just embedding a class file (later a jar) in a web page.

efficax 4y ago

JDK has always been free, microsoft would have charged a hefty license fee for the equivalent

ThrowawayR2 4y ago

IMO it was a strategic move to commoditize their complement. My impression during that era was that Scott McNealy saw Microsoft (whose strength was in software) as Sun Microsystems' (whose strength was in hardware) most important competitor and took steps to stem their influence. Java was one example of a giveaway intended to create a Sun-controlled moat to protect their business. The purchase of StarOffice and its open-sourcing as OpenOffice, which eventually begat LibreOffice, seemed to be an attempt to put a dent in Microsoft's MSOffice revenue.

mike_hearn 4y ago
Spolski argues here that it was actually backwards: they weren't commoditizing their compliment, they were commoditizing their core: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ If you sell hardware the last thing you want to do is commoditize hardware, which is what a portable software strategy does. What you want is hardware lockin. Java was the opposite of that. Sun eventually had to be sold, but Microsoft didn't.
giantrobot 4y ago
Sun intended Java to be an uber-platform, to get it running on everything from tiny embedded systems to their giant E10k systems. They'd make money selling JVM licenses in various verticals. Sun bought into Netscape's vision of the web as the delivery platform for software. Java could run on the server side and then as applets in the browser on the client. The expansion of Java would then expand its use in places Sun wanted to charge for licenses. Java wouldn't create a moat around their hardware. It was intended to eliminate Microsoft's moat around the Windows platform. If ISVs could write software in Java that could be delivered by a browser on any OS, the actual OS stopped being important. As long as there was a browser and JVM available on a platform it could run that software.