Ex-Sun CEO Warns Oracle of Death By Open Source 408
gearystwatcher writes "Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy talks to The Reg on where things went wrong, and acquisition by Oracle: 'We probably got a little too aggressive near the end and probably open sourced too much and tried too hard to appease the community and tried too hard to share,' McNealy said. 'You gotta take care of your shareholders or you end up very vulnerable like we got. We were a wonderful acquisition — we got stolen for a song at the bottom of the Dow.'"
Sales process sucked (Score:5, Informative)
Did anyone ever try to buy things from Sun?
No other company I ever worked with made it so hard. Unless you were a megacustomer, it was actually fairly difficult to actually buy anything from them.
In contrast, buying RedHat on the small scale is click, click, done.
Here's a summary of Ellison's rant on why Sun died, notice the complaints are mostly about sales and engineering decisions, open source had very little to do with it:
http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2010/05/13/oracles-ellison-sun-execs-were-astonishingly-bad-managers/ [barrons.com]
Re:Business vs Open Source (Score:4, Informative)
.......yet lacks such newfangled things as OpenGL support
Say what? OpenGL has been supported since Java 5 [oracle.com], which is itself over 4 years old.