Sun is the line. Perhaps they couldn't sell their product either, but their competitors were making bank selling software instead of giving it away. Look at what oracle is doing with their IP
I was referring more to how they are handling Solaris, but Java is another prime example of a technology that Sun failed capitalize on in spite of making it open source.
OSS is a great idea for commodity software that has little margin left in it anyways, but very few open source their core competency and live to tell about it. The exception to that rule is probably Red Hat.
The smart thing to do is to open source your complements, something Google and Apple do phenomenally well at.
Sun fought the open sourcing of Java for a long time past when it made economic sense for them to do it so it's an odd example of going too far with open source.
Even now the booby traps they laid are being put into actual use and the end result could be a true open source fork which will be very good for the Java ecosystem, and less than optimal for Oracle.
