I love open source, and if I had the money, would work with nothing else. That said... for a big business like Sun, would that really have helped? Maybe their stuff would have been more popular, but it would have required a wrenching transition to services that might have hurt them very deeply.
I think they should have taken this alternate Open path and coupled it with business-as-usual in the rest of the organization.
So they lose revenues in the normal part of Sun because those customers now pickup their SW for nothing essentially, and instead of Sun then laying off employees, they are shifted into services. One area goes down, another goes up.
Hardware at Sun then becomes less focused on manufacturing, and more about building a community of external implementors by providing good HW designs and support.
> instead of Sun then laying off employees, they are shifted into services. One area goes down, another goes up.
The same people that might make great software producers might be lousy at services, so it's entirely possible that large layoffs would still happen, which would hurt morale. Indeed, 'services' is a different industry, and it's not like you can just pick up from one day to the next and become a services company. IBM managed to do that, so maybe they would be a good fit, but it's not an easy thing to accomplish in any case.
