They really did mess up their software division. So much lost potential. Sun, like many of the other Unix vendors of the time, wanted not only to invent the ne

They really did mess up their software division. So much lost potential. Sun, like many of the other Unix vendors of the time, wanted not only to invent the new world but to fully own and charge for it. Self only got open sourced long after it was of any interest or relevancy, NeWS never was, and the OpenLook stuff generally only got really "open" after Motif "standardized" (itself a joke since it never got actually used outside of proprietary-land) and it wasn't until well into the 21st century that the JDK became properly open sourced. But in fact the relative openness of Java at the time it was launched seemed like a bright spot in this, and in part this was why it was so ascendant through the 90s. BTW I like Self, but I actually don't think it would have made a good JS-equivalent in a document browser. It really is, like Smalltalk, something that wants to rebuild the whole world in its image, and not much of a "glue" language, like JS was initially pitched as.