Comment by spauldo
6 hours ago
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.
> SPARC has been licensed to several manufacturers, including Atmel, Bipolar Integrated Technology, Cypress Semiconductor, Fujitsu, Matsushita and Texas Instruments.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC
Fujitsu was selling Solaris-compatible systems (as were many others). Linux and BSDs also ran on them.
There were a number of x86 makers up until the 1990s or so, but who is left of them? Can you still license x86(_x64) to fab your own CPUs? You can with SPARC:
* https://www.gaisler.com/products/gr765
"Many others" is stretching the truth a bit. There were maybe 4 or 5 Sparc clone vendors, ever. The one I remember offhand is Solbourne: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solbourne_Computer
Sadly, they left the Sparc clone business before they could even support Solaris! They stopped at SunOS 4.1.