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Comment by The_Colonel | Hacker News Reader

Sun software was for a long time closed source, their turn to open source was more like a hail mary rather than some deeply held belief.

I'd say that 1990s, 2000s google was pretty cool, but it turned evil quite quickly.

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When Solaris 2 came out, they gave us the choice to buy their C compiler or to install the free-of-charge open-source gcc. There was no pressure to buy. If we were private users rather than corporate users, that was especially the case.

And a lot of Java stuff was sold to us for a very nominal sum (probably just the cost of production).

> There was no pressure to buy.

With the caveat that you had to buy Solaris.

Well, yes, but you had Solaris 2 in the first place or you didn't need either Sun's compiler or gcc at all.

Sun took a while to change the model but went bigger on OSS than any other company by a mile. They published their code but not under an OSS license.

Since Schmidt was the CTO of Sun Google inherited some of its culture. But that faded away.

> Sun took a while to change the model but went bigger on OSS than any other company by a mile. They published their code but not under an OSS license.

? The big one I know about was OpenSolaris under CDDL; what non-OSS licenses did they use?

E.g. source for the JDKs Java classes shipped with the JDK well before the open sourcing of the JDK. It had the click through download license.

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