It wasn’t forward facing from a morality standpoint. It was a business strategy. Every tech company open sources (or tries to standardize) things where their competitor is stronger.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

If I remember this correctly, the move was largely an attempt to make the OS irrelevant by moving applications to the Web. Long term, this more or less worked, but the revolution didn't come quickly enough to save Sun or Netscape.

[dead]