Sun had some great people and some good ideas and products, but as a coherent business it was a rolling train wreck.
Looking back at interviews and industry articles from that era, there is a common theme of Sun hating Microsoft. Lots of companies and people hated Microsoft but Sun seemed to make it their central ideology. As a result, they took their eye off of making great technology that customers could use to solve their problems. It's a pity because they were so far ahead of the game at that point that they could have developed into something wonderful instead of being absorbed by Oracle, with little trace left besides Java sleepwalking through the modern era.
I think basically everyone did back then. There was a pervasive understanding that if you were small enough, Microsoft would use underhanded business practices to crush you if you became a threat. If you made a compelling product, Microsoft would clone it and use their might to make it win.
It felt like taking a pottery class with a grizzly bear in the room. Really hard to be like, "I should just make the prettiest bowl I can" when you know at a moment's notice your head might be swiped off.
I had an internship at Sun in 2002. I distinctly remember a town-hall meeting hosted by Johnathan Schwartz (CTO at the time, later to be CEO) where an engineer asked something to the effect of "this all sounds great, but how does this actually make us money?" The engineer was told in no uncertain terms that he shouldn't ask such questions, that he should focus on engineering and that he should trust that other people would handle the money side.
Then they were hoping that no one would buy them, not even themselves cared to own Java after their trick.
So now they push Kotlin, while researching Fuchsia, and keep a bunch of lawyers quite happy.
Interesting logic.
Thankfully we are going to have that settled in the near future, and then Android folks can party all night long with their Kotlin implementation and rename ART into KVM.
AFAICT the whole fight is over API's and not "don't pay what the license specifies" as they give you the ability to do a clean-room implementation without paying royalties.
Not what I would call a tornado in the meaning pf destruction.
And about the license, well, it is disputed, right? I only read about it tangential, but the case seemed far from crystal clear to me.
No one needs Android Java slowing down the Java ecosystem by imposing additional burdens on Java library authors that also want to target Android.
Besides Google that is.
It explicitly only allowed the use of JavaSE on desktop deployments, OpenJDK was yet to be made available.
I was the only PC guy on my gang, and that was just due to other factors not commodity.