From what i remember from Bryan Cantrill's talks there were talks about open sourcing Solaris years before sun actually did that.

If Solaris was open sourced say, five years earlier, it would probably have been a major player in the OS space today. (we'll never know, of course, history took a different turn).

> But then Google & Co introduced them into the corporate world

IIRC i read/heard somewhere that there were also talks for Google to use sun hardware or the solaris OS for their internal infra. I don't remember the source for that though :(