• Sources: primary, discussion
  • Summary: Bryan Cantrill published a short answer on 2026-09-20 to the question Sun nostalgia usually avoids, distilled to one claim, that Sun had become bored with the mechanics of running a business. The anchoring episode is a 2005 startup running OpenSolaris that wanted to buy a large amount of Sun hardware and could not get Sun to answer the phone, while Dell's local account executive closed the deal in under two weeks. The post reached roughly 600 points and is carried as discussion, because its value on the day was the argument and the thread around it rather than implementation detail.
  • Why it matters: The framing is strategic success undone by operational failure, which is the transferable part for anyone whose open source strategy is working while the surrounding business execution is not.

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