Although Ciro Santilli is a bit past their era, there's an aura of technical excellence about those people. It just seems that they sucked at business. Those open source hippies. Erm, wait.
Bibliography:
- archive.org/details/sunburstascentof00hall Sunburst: the ascent of Sun Microsystems by Mark Hall (1990)
The Dawn and Dusk of Sun Microsystems by Asianometry (2022)
Source. One of the main inspirations for the creation of their workstations were CAD applications.