Maybe I'm reading too much into the above statement, but the point of a company is to make profits. There are these things called "charities" for cases when you don't want to do that.
That said, Sun's approach in recent years has certainly been a mess. They have failed to really make open source work for them as a strategy in the same way companies like IBM and Apple have.
Sun has given a lot to open source, but they don't seem to have gotten as much back as IBM. I think once again the issue is that there wasn't a particularly clear strategy.
The sad part is that it is far superior now. A friend of mine converted me 8 months ago and I am petrified that it will get lost in the shuffle now. The thought of going back to Eclipse is mortifying after having such a consistent experience with Netbeans.
I don't know why but I feel that NetBeans is more organized and less "rugged" compare to Eclipse.
And it looks like that turned out to be a superior strategy, in a profit-minded sort of way.
But Sun, on the other hand, had a whole other set of problems. Apple is a consumer facing company. Sun is a business facing company. Sun's biggest competitor was Linux on any-brand PC server. That's a big challenge. So, they fought open source the only way they knew how... join them. If your biggest competitor is free running on commodity boxes, you have to go to that space. Unfortunately, there wasn't enough of a difference between Solaris and Linux to matter to most people, so they went with Linux. There is some great open source stuff in Solaris (ZFS, DTrace), but ultimately, there just wasn't enough 'there' there.
And then once you've lost the OS war, all that was left was hardware. Which, while high-quality, just wasn't enough to keep _all_ of Sun afloat. Perhaps though, it would have been enough to support the hardware divisions of Sun.
Similarly with Sun, it wasn't Sun verus the nebulous Linux. It was Sun versus the Linux ecosystem. You could argue too that one problem with Sun was that they sold hardware and software, and that you could get them separately.
IBM is basically a services company for the most part. The more they can do to reduce the amount of money a customer is paying in software licensing (sometimes to other companies), the more they can charge for their own services on a project. It is to their benefit for there to be as much free (as in beer) software out there as possible so a higher percentage of a project's overall budget goes to IBM.
Apple is primarily a hardware company. It is in their interest to make use of whatever community software is out there so that they don't have to re-invent the wheel for everything. They look to open source software as a way to augment what they can do internally without having to acquire tons of software companies just to get basic software technology in-house. This frees up cash for hardware R&D and aquisitions (PA Semi, Fingerworks, etc...).
Sun has suffered from an identity crisis in recent years. Were they a software company? A hardware company? Both? They don't appear to have been able to answer that question themselves. It's hard to have an open source strategy (or any other kind of strategy for that matter) when you don't even know what business you're in.
I would like to point out that the leadership of Sun for the past good couple of years seemed completely averse to profit.
Only that would explain such a long series of blunders.