Comment by TimTheTinker
2 months ago
I can't think of an outcome that would be more odious to Steve Tuck and Brian Cantrill. Brian in particular still talks about the soul-crushing experience of Oracle's hostile takeover of Sun Microsystems.
2 months ago
I can't think of an outcome that would be more odious to Steve Tuck and Brian Cantrill. Brian in particular still talks about the soul-crushing experience of Oracle's hostile takeover of Sun Microsystems.
Which many keep forgetting is that there was no one else wanting to acquire Sun, IBM did an offer that was shortly thereafter withdrawn, and that was it.
Sun would have died, everything completely lost among creditors and that would be it, end of story.
I don't think that's true. Oracle just came in with clearly higher price then anybody else was willing to even consider.
They could also have fired a lot of people and likely survived. But the CEO clearly had no interest in that path.
One great thing about historical fact is that anyone is able to check them, including interviews with key figures.
I am using computers since 1986.
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Google could have bought Sun for less than they wound up paying in a decade of legal fees anyways over Android Java.
Indeed, which is why I am the opinion they had nothing to complain about.
However given their track record designing programming languages, thankfully that did not happen.
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How about the sellout of Joyent to Samsung?
Joyent was likely a part of what convinced Brian Cantrill that a new cloud machine was needed. They had their own stack running on commodity OEM hardware in their own cloud - likely a painful experience, since Brian talks a lot about how much of a difference it makes to own the complete root of trust and everything in it.
Joyent was founded in 2004. Bryan joined in 2014 - I doubt he had much, if any, say in the sale proceeding or not.
He became CTO in 2014. I was familiar with him at Joyent some years before that though.
edit/update: and the Samsung acquisition was in 2016. So I'd hope the CTO would have _some_ involvement in that decision.
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