At the time, Sun were pushing it heavily as one of the two salvations for Solaris, so I'm not surprised.
I have to say that my limited experience in dealing with Sun as a customer mirrors Brendan's comments around a remarkable arrogance, and it probably played no small part in their downfall.
> At the time, Sun were pushing it heavily as one of the two salvations for Solaris, so I'm not surprised.
Yeah, I remember that. I kept thinking "this tool might be nice for C wizards but it does nothing for my day-to-day experience as smalltime Linux user / admin". The other big thing was ZFS, which was interesting, but they were extremely uncooperative with the license, basically ensuring it would never make it big.
This has me imagining a struggling engineer at Sun, trying to live up to the arrogance and falling short, who finds Brendan's work and decides to save his career by passing it off as his own. Then some high-level executive decides to make it one of the straws that will save the company...
This is a made-up story, so you are free to make up your own ending as to whether this was the world-travelling VIP, and if so, whether he had some partial or complete flashback on hearing Brendan's name. One thing we can be sure of: whoever 'carelessly' stripped the copyright notice out of Brendan's code had seen his name before (and it was, perhaps, the part of the code he was most familiar with!)
