Scott McNealy
Co-founder and CEO, Sun Microsystems
The network is the computer, and giving Java away
Rating
88Impact score
Domains
WorkstationsJavaOpen source
Scouting report
Ran Sun for twenty-two years and shipped an extraordinary amount of what the internet was built on: NFS, SPARC, Solaris and Java. Sun published NFS as an open specification, released OpenSolaris in 2005 and put Java under the GPL in 2006, decisions that outlived the company since OpenJDK is what most Java runs on today. Commodity Linux boxes killed the workstation business.
Curator’s note
Gave away more load-bearing software than any CEO before him, and still lost the company.
Sources
- 01Scott McNealy en.wikipedia.org
- 02OpenJDK en.wikipedia.org
- 03Sun Microsystems en.wikipedia.org