There is an alternative universe where Scott G. McNealy has a backbone and doesn't stop participating in BSD development. Sun almost up-streamed NeWS, and they

There is an alternative universe where Scott G. McNealy has a backbone and doesn't stop participating in BSD development. Sun almost up-streamed NeWS, and they did a ton of other stuff that should have continue to go into BSD. Driven by Sun as the primary BSD advocate, BSD would have dominated being both open and with a powerful backer. Sun really had the largest unix mind-share and most application were targeted at Sun workstations. Eventually this resulted in the Unix wars because lots of people were afraid of Sun/AT&T. Sun could have avoid that and simply made itself and BSD the standard. If that standard was open, there wouldn't have formed a powerful alliance against them. AT&T would still have tried but non-open alliance lead by AT&T wouldn't work out well. But because of a bunch of lawyers and eventually one bad quarter, Sun went full out proprietary and joined itself to AT&T.