Sun Microsystems - Goodbye and thanks for all the UNIX

Sun Microsystems is no more, having been purchased by a company (Oracle) that seems intent on capturing "open" software and hijacking that software for short-term gain. Certain aspects of the Oracle deal just point to Oracles acquisition of first InnoDB (the storage engine that MySQL uses) and then MySQL itself with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, as a method to hijack the MySQL open source project.

But Sun’s founders, were amongst the creators of FreeBSD (through Bill Joy’s work on BSD UNIX), and Sun was always the strongest large Corporate proponent of "Openness" in software directly creating Java, MySQL, and having strongly contributed to the vision that produced Linux (through open UNIX work), and PHP (which owes at least some of its inception to Sun’s java server pages). The whole LAMP stack traces at least some of its roots back to Sun (Apache owning the least to Sun, but you get my meaning).

I think we are not taking account of the large position that Sun had as an intellectual proponent of openness in software. And I for one will lament its passing, especially as Oracle starts using Sun Intellectual Property as a patent-troll to quash innovation in the space.