I was just a kid when Sun died, reading about all the drama of the buyout and the series of forks on Slashdot whenever I had already finished my work in my high school computer science class every morning.
I didn't really know what or how to think about the mismanagement aspect of it, but I was already a F/OSS enthusiast by that time. I ran Linux at home and used free software everywhere I could. I even eschewed Times New Roman in favor of Linux Libertine (then the font of the W in the Wikipedia logo!) for my school essays because I didn't want to support the hegemony of a proprietary typeface.
What I did understand about Sun was that they had been the caretakers (and sometimes creators) of some of the most important and beloved technology I'd ever used. I didn't know anything about Solaris, Hudson, ZFS or SPARC, but I knew Sun for VirtualBox, OpenOffice, the MySQL database system that seemed to be everywhere in the open-source world, and the Java programming language I was writing in for school.
I remember a sense that something precious had died with that buyout, even though I didn't understand what led up to it. I worried a lot about OpenOffice, which I relied on and advocated to friends, and I practically cheered when I read about the formation of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.
I didn't really know what or how to think about the mismanagement aspect of it, but I was already a F/OSS enthusiast by that time. I ran Linux at home and used free software everywhere I could. I even eschewed Times New Roman in favor of Linux Libertine (then the font of the W in the Wikipedia logo!) for my school essays because I didn't want to support the hegemony of a proprietary typeface.
What I did understand about Sun was that they had been the caretakers (and sometimes creators) of some of the most important and beloved technology I'd ever used. I didn't know anything about Solaris, Hudson, ZFS or SPARC, but I knew Sun for VirtualBox, OpenOffice, the MySQL database system that seemed to be everywhere in the open-source world, and the Java programming language I was writing in for school.
I remember a sense that something precious had died with that buyout, even though I didn't understand what led up to it. I worried a lot about OpenOffice, which I relied on and advocated to friends, and I practically cheered when I read about the formation of The Document Foundation and LibreOffice.