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

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.

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

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.

Hardware was Sun's revenue model.

Cost of revenue for penny-ante fluff would have been orders of magnitude greater than actual revenue. Goodwill and other benefits substantively greater.

Blaming Sun's demise on Virtualbox largess is ludicrous on its face.

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