Just found this on /. and found it an interesting read: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html It seems to explain IBMs big OSS push, although I dont think Sun is as much of a loose cannon as he makes them out to be. What do you think?
University is a fountain of knowledge, and students go there to drink.

I read that earlier today off the slashdot link. Overall the essay was pretty good although at times I found the author''s attitude rather offputting.

Sun''s approach does seem somewhat confused when viewed through this rubric. Perhaps the "commidity target" of Java is programmers with WORA as the hook to get coders to adopt Java. The idea that a corporation would make the effort to reduce the cost of labor is old and familiar. But Java was also promoted as an OS killer too - especially in the early days of Netscape when the idea that software would be distributed over the net and run inside the browser was pushed as the next wave. This is one of the reasons given why Microsoft made such an about face in regards to the internet. They saw web browsers as a threat to the OS and took steps against that threat by interleaving the browser with the OS and so on.

Just for context: Joel Spolsky is a former MS employee. I think he was the architect behind Excel VBA.