Sun has been a company in trouble for years now. Until recently, I was never really worried about it going under. Now, I’m worried.
Now, I have a love/hate relationship with Sun. I love many of their products like the SPARC workstations and much of the goodness in first the SunOS and now Solaris/OpenSolaris operating systems. I hate the results of their internal civil wars, which has made Sun shift like a snake in desert noon-day light from hardware to software company and from proprietary to open-source company.
I felt like I never knew which Sun I’d be meeting: the good Sun, the one that was open-standard and open-source friendly, or the bad Sun, the company that wanted iron-control over every product that it ever touched. I wasn’t the only one that was confused by Sun. With every switch back and forth it seemed to me that they lost ground.