In 1999 Sun acquired the StarOffice software suite, a competitor of Microsoft’s Office suite (primarily Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), and distributed it for free under the name OpenOffice. The company strengthened its open-source commitment that year by also selling Linux directly to its customers on its workstations. Sun moved even more forcefully into the open-source movement in 2005, releasing some 1,600 patents to the public domain, and followed up the next year by making Java open-source. In 2008 Sun bought the software developer MySQL AB and continued to support MySQL as an open-source database program.

In 2002 market pressures forced Sun to adopt x86 microprocessors. Instead of buying them from Intel, Sun bought them from Intel’s biggest competitor, Advanced Micro Devices. However, soon after Jonathan Schwartz replaced McNealy as CEO in 2006, the company started working closely with Intel and chose that company’s chip set for some of its servers.

By the spring of 2009, Sun’s business was suffering because of the Great Recession and lower-priced competitors. In April, after the company failed to come to an agreement to be acquired by IBM, Oracle stepped in and offered to buy Sun in a deal estimated at $7.4 billion. Although the acquisition passed U.S. antitrust scrutiny, the European Union (EU) slowed the purchase down by questioning whether Oracle would continue to support the MySQL database. With Oracle’s assurances of such support, the EU regulators approved the deal in January 2010.

Mark Hall and John Barry, Sunburst: The Ascent of Sun Microsystems (1990), is an insider’s look at the fast-paced first 15 years of the company. Karen Southwick, High Noon: The Inside Story of Scott McNealy and the Rise of Sun Microsystems (1999), is an unofficial biography of Sun’s cofounder and longtime CEO that explains how his personality helped drive the company’s success.