Comment by pjmlp
20 hours ago
I kind of agree, I was there when Apple was showing up at CERN IT trying to sell OS X a great UNIX workstation, and also though .NET was going to be fully open source, and to this day we have to thank the community efforts from Avalonia and Uno, for the actual GUI frameworks that support all major consumer OSes.
Also Microsoft lost a big opportunity with Unity (not helping them updating .NET) and killing off XNA, two major ways how kids get into .NET.
That coupled with Unity's mismanagement, means indies are more likely to keep using C++ based engines like Godot or Defold, and losing yet another adoption vector. Yes Godot does support C#, but GDscript is winning the heart of indie devs.
Just wait for the new, kinder, gentler Oracle, that one will be a hoot. Ellison will probably have to be carried out first, unfortunately.
Contrary to HN folks, I habe no issues with Oracle, it is my favourite database engine.
Also it was the only company that cared to buy Sun.
People love to hate it, everyone praises Sun, yet in the end no one felt it was worth rescuing, not even Google, that could have taken advantage to finally control Java.
I guess most would rather have seen Java die in version 6, and Maxime VM ideas never becoming mainstream, or the first UNIX with hardware memory tagging for taming C never coming out.
And since I am not a fan boy I am also quite aware that what doesn't produce profit, is immediately killed by Oracle, and they are quite found of enforcing their licenses, hence why people have to actually read those licenses.
IBM did bid, but Oracle jumped in with a higher offer. Supposedly (IIRC) the Sun leadership had wanted and expected IBM to buy Sun but didn't feel it could refuse the higher bid. Aside from Java Google would surely have been a very awkward fit with Sun, as Google was basically the poster child for never buying anything from Sun.