Comment by MichaelMoser123

i think sun tried to sell more servers and storage systems by giving free access to the tools (JVM/JDK) that would simplify enterprise software development - without having to worry about core dumps or very long compilation times. It might be that Joel was too focused on Microsoft in order to see that.

Also SUN was selling licenses for very expensive J2EE stuff (remember EJB? That's the stuff that was replaced by spring) Giving free access to the JDK would make sense, as making the complement cheaper to create demand for EJB (that would have worked if EJB would have been easier to use)

Java was initially focused on small devices, but that was not it's main use case at the turn of the century. i think phone hardware was too limited for Java until a few years later, when Sun was no longer around (actually we had the epic Oracle vs Google case, which might have been a Sun vs Google case - sans acquisition by Oracle)

It may well be that Linux became good enough for this market segment and thereby turned server hardware (i.e. Sun) into a commodity, but that's a different story.