> see how Sun's policies are being reversed in all public-facing fronts.
Like "making money"?
Kidding aside, I think you can mix free with proprietary in a way that's beneficial to the community without giving away too much. Google seems to do a lot of open source these days even though there is tons of stuff they keep to themselves. They seem to have a decent image for the work they do perform.
Sun had sort of a weird image, IMO - they were kind of heel-draggers in some ways, ahead of the curve in others. More than anything they just seemed confused. I don't think that, overall, they ever really figured out open source and what they should do with it.
Oracle's ideas about open source seem to be along the lines of "take what we can, give as little as possible back". We'll see though...
Not really. Remember Sun's stock during the dotcom boom.
Sun failed because of poor execution. They blew the cloud computing opportunity. Their sales people did not chase orders like the HP guys did (this is for a personal experience ). Their Java application server sucked when compared to Websphere and Weblogic. They could not deliver a good story with MySQL acquisition. They let Linux get ahead of Solaris , at least in mind share.
And get the free version of Oracle, as easily as you can get MySQL. You can't do that with DB2. Oracle has a public Yum server too: http://public-yum.oracle.com/
