Sun was losing money so they had to sell. It was a screwed up business that had a lot of great open source software being built.

Hardware is hard. My outsiders prospective is that Sun tried hard to make money at it by giving away the software. They failed.

Red Hat seems to do this better, they open source their software and charge for support. I think Sun would be here today if they operated more like Red Hat and offered a Nexenta style product with a commercial license and support than trying to do hardware.

they capitalized on Solaris (read SunOS) for many years, making sure the online documentation is obtuse and the best option for companies is to buy pricey support contracts. or send their DevOps to training courses, at a premium. They really made sure their online community/footprint was kept to a minimum - googlging issues and errors often led nowhere and left no choice but to call upon the support gods who'd login and fix things. the support folk were nice people - but it left you non the wiser about your issue.

They also are capitalizing on Java using premium licensing if you're building with Oracle Java for the enterprise and planning to make money from it.

my source is my own experience working with Solaris, which beyond ZFS and OracleDB, has very few things going for it - it made me feel like a bad Sysadmin, really. maybe i was, maybe it is a better OS than my experience taught me.

now they've decided to go all cloud, and are killing Solaris. Java will probably still continue being developed.

I'd bet they make a load of cash from all the Enterprise support agreements that there are for Solaris systems in large enterprises.

The pace of change on these things isn't high, so even if the costs go up it takes a long time for people to migrate off the platform.

They bought it for the high-end enterprise use, which is the part that made money. They screwed up the open-source/consumer-facing parts, but those never made any money for Sun in the first place.