The arrow of time

This truly feels like an end of an era. SUN (Stanford University Network) was one of the last, if not the last, big ancient technology company that did innovation just for innovation sake. They were in it both in the software and in the hardware fields. Users not faimilar with the history of  IT technology (especially the history of Unix) might be surprised to find out that without Sun, the world would directly lack all of the following services or products, all of which have in some way been given freely to Open source so the world can benefit from them:

• NFS - Network File System
• Solaris / OpenSolaris
• Java and its whole ecosystem
• ZFS
• DTrace
  
• The Sun Grid Engine
  
• SPARC CPUs, including the Niagara series (64 logical CPUs / hardware threads)
  

Additionally, without Sun, the following services or products would probably not be as popular, would not be as widespread as they have become or would become widespread much later:

• TCP/IP
• Much of what today consitutes a modern Unix-like system
• X11
  
• XML
• OpenMP
• OpenMPI
• Modular datacentres ("datacentar in a box", "Project Blackbox")
  

Over the years, Sun has in some way acquired the following companies, services and products that are in some way important to the world of computing in general or the Open source community in specific:

• Cray business systems division
• Tarantella (formerly SCO)
• StorageTek
• Cluster File Systems (authors of Lustre)
• OpenOffice (formerly StarOffice)
  
• MySQL
• InnoTek (authors of VirtualBox)

All this makes a very powerful portfolio. Almost every referenced service or project is/was groundbreaking in its own way and paved the way for a whole host of additional services and businesses created on top of them.

Specifically, the world of Open source would be significantly shrunk if there wasn't for Sun. A report prepared for the EU calls Sun the single most important contributor to Open source ever, with contributions larger than the combined sum of the next five largest commercial contributors (which are: IBM, RedHat, SGI, SAP and the former MySQL AB company) [p.51].

Just imagine if for some reason every one of these technologies disappeared off the Oracle's business map tomorrow. I don't think that the "open source community" (which boils down to regular plain old volunteers at the heart of things) can maintain the currently available versions, let alone continue their development and progress.

Sadly, a case can be made that Sun did not manage its portfolio as well as it could have. Even without the harsh realities of business (i.e. human greed), it was doubtful that Sun's altruistic moves would find resonance with the users who have benefited from it. The whole story of Sun looks like a poster example for the saying "no good deed goes unpunished".

On the other side, Cisco has started peddling x86 servers! Now the world is really comming to an end!

Both Cisco and Oracle are not, or have not been for some time now, nearly as innovation-driven as Sun. Both companies (and not only them - see for example IBM) are in the recent time growing  their portfolios in the most part through acquisitions of other, more agile companies.