Comment by throw0101a
2 hours ago
> Difference is Sun was providing a "full stack" proprietary product including CPUs running a proprietary ISA, Unix OS, compiler, desktop environment and productivity apps.
SPARC was not proprietary, buy fully licensable:
Fujitsu sold their own SPARC servers for many years with their own CPUs, and many third-parties put Fujitsu SPARC CPUs into (e.g.) laptops:
* https://jasoneckert.github.io/myblog/sparcbook3000st-the-coo...
Can you get an x86_64 CPU from someone other than Intel or AMD? x86 is much more proprietary than SPARC ever was.
Sun used the non-proprietary Open Firmware (IEEE 1275) for booting (also used by Apple with PowerPC), and SBus (IEEE 1496) for cards before moving to PCI. SCSI and Ethernet/IP were there since forever as well.
The "proprietary" label on Sun, at least when it came to hardware, was always a mystery to me.
It's the platform that's proprietary.
Sun used a lot of open parts, but they had absolute control over the platform. Everything in your solution came from Sun or a Sun partner. Fujitsu doing weird stuff with Japanese mainframes was an interesting fact but irrelevant to 99% of Sun's user base.
Intel/AMD combined with EFI or IBM-compatible BIOS? You can get that from anybody. An HP server is basically interchangeable with a Dell.
Sun was proprietary in the same way Apple is.