I know OP has an intimately inside perspective, whereas what I know about Sun is only from what I read online as an admirer and developer on its platforms… but “gotten bored of the mechanics of running a business” does not match what seemed to be more about having gotten “too enterprise-y” or “too out of touch with the market” and maybe also “too hubristic.”

when I was a student in the waning days of Sun, the SPARC/Solaris machines were impenetrable Big Iron guarded closely by the greybeards -- not to be touched by the likes of mere undergrads. Never really did get beyond noodling around with cast off gear from eBay, though I did get to enjoy a bit of it via the Sun DNA in SmartOS years later.

The good thing about Sun (when working at a corporate customer) was that they were very good at getting their distinguished tech people into give talks - Tim Bray, James Gosling etc.

While we're reminiscing, I never did understand why Sun paid a billion dollars for MySQL in 2008.

So far the best theory I've heard was that it was bait to make them tastier to IBM and Oracle - but even that seems kind of weak; had they really given up at that point? Does anyone have a better theory?

I wonder if bcantrill will ever get back into cloud hosting ... to revive his Joyent days (which he alludes to without naming directly in the post).

Very expensive and valuable information to come by, thanks for sharing.

How timely, I was just thinking about Sun after doing some office rearranging last week and running into a bunch of sun branded ethernet cables.

> all of these homage shirts are amazing

You can't just say that without sharing those too!

Solaris lack of a package manager and crappy patches where patches replaced things wholesale, caused us a lot of overtime, but hey, got me a bigger house! Thanks Sun! Oh btw their hardware was way ahead of their shit software, which wasn’t as bad as shittier IBM or Digital or HP