[nvm0n1]

Maybe that approach to licensing is why Sun ran out of money and had to sell itself?

[jzb]

Sun has its lunch eaten by Linux and commodity hardware. Selling proprietary UNIX and super expensive hardware was a great business until Linux and (comparatively) cheap Intel boxes were good enough for more and more customers.

[thrawaway3292]

I doubt VirtualBox was even a line item on Sun's financials, so I really doubt that had anything to do with their failure.

[nvm0n1]

What I meant is, a lackadaisical approach to billing and asking for money was common at Sun for everything software related, same thing for Java which was definitely a line item.