What to say when Steve Jobs threatens to sue you.

Original text by Jonathan Schwartz.

More about Lighthouse Design’s Concurrence courtesy of the Apple Wikia instance.

Sun famously sued Microsoft over their incompatible Java implenentation variant in 1997. Microsoft settled by paying Sun a bunch of money. Please enjoy this Flash animation shown at JavaOne 2004 retelling the story.

Steve Jobs quotes from Triumph of the Nerds, WWDC 1997 Q&A, and Macworld San Francisco 2003.

In the mid-1990s, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision and its StarOffice product, which Sun open sourced and renamed OpenOffice. After some entirely predictable grief from Oracle, the community forked the project and delivered what we know today as LibreOffice.

Apple adopted Sun’s dynamic system-wide tracing and performance profiling framework DTrace, known as Instruments in Xcode’s collection of tools.

Apple announced Snow Leopard Server would ship with Sun’s ZFS but that ultimately never happened for licensing and patent reasons. Whether Sun’s soon-to-be-acquisition by Oracle and the Steve Jobs/Larry Ellison relationship would have helped or hindered this, we’ll never know. Either way, Apple, I know you’re reading this and I’d like APFS to checksum my data blocks too, not just the metadata. Thank you.

Jonathan Schwartz and Scott McNealy quotes from Sun’s NC03-Q3 (2003) keynote and JavaOne 2004.

See Project Looking Glass in action.