On 20 September 2026, Bryan Cantrill used an Oxide T-shirt to revisit Sun’s strengths and failures. The Oxide team was preparing for its annual OxCon meetup in Emeryville. The remote company had made shirts honoring earlier computer companies, with designs by Ben Leonard. One Sun-themed design was shared before the event because it was too good to keep secret.

Cantrill says Sun earned much of the affection it still receives. Oxide’s mission draws directly on Scott McNealy’s assessment of Sun. McNealy said that after 28 years at the company, he had never been ashamed enough to hide the newspaper from his children. Cantrill had already outlined his own criticism in a 2011 Hacker News comment. Fifteen years later, he reduces it to one point: Sun had lost interest in the practical work of running a business.

A 2005 customer story illustrates the problem. A fast-growing startup running its infrastructure on OpenSolaris wanted to buy a large amount of Sun hardware. Its use of Sun software and its hardware demand should have validated the OpenSolaris strategy. Sun failed to return the calls, and its eventual response offered the wrong product.

Dell answered a web form submitted during the night. The next morning, local account executive Steve called the startup. Within two weeks, the startup had received its servers. It also arranged leasing based on its financial statements without personal guarantees. Steve handled about 95 percent of the work. The startup described the episode in the 2006 blog post “The Sun Doesn’t Shine on Me.”

Cantrill read that account while starting Fishworks in a disused corner of a Sun office, before the team had a permanent base in San Francisco. He saw a company with a strong strategic idea and a serious operational failure. Sun continued for several more years, while employees tried to repair the business, but it did not survive.

After leaving Sun, Cantrill joined the startup, Joyent. Joyent later hired Steve, and Cantrill and Steve eventually founded Oxide together. Cantrill says Oxide’s tributes to Sun and other defunct computer companies serve two purposes. They recognize what those companies achieved and preserve their failures as warnings.