Between BusinessWeek’s “That’s One Way To Reinvent A Company” and “Scott McNealy’s five reasons that free, open source software is good for Sun and our customers” from Jim Laurent’s Weblog, there’s some good insight into the history of Sun’s open source enlightenment this week.

It is interesting to see how far the company has come. It is also worth considering that the path to open source is not always a straightforward. After all, less than six years ago the company announced that it was dropping support for Solaris on Intel.

Had the company stuck to its guns the impact on its long-term survival would have been disastrous. It’s certainly hard to believe that without Solaris on x86 the industry would have still seen OpenSolaris.

As it is, the reaction to that announcement arguably set the company on a path that eventually led to it offering almost all of its software under open source licenses.

First the company restored support for Solaris on Intel after a backlash from the Solaris x86 community, as the company also delivered its first general-purpose x86-based servers as well as its own version of Linux.

Sun Linux did not last long, as the company saw the wisdom of supporting the major Linux distributions. Meanwhile, Sun’s engagement with the community of Solaris x86 users led it to begin talking about the potential of building an open source community around the Unix operating system.

The company duly announced its community advisory board, before releasing the code under an open source license. It hasn’t looked back since, and multiple open source projects have duly followed.

There was a suggestion at the time that Sun turned its back on Solaris 9 for x86 that the announcement was in fact part of a deliberate plan designed to mobilize the Solaris user community and enable the company to measure demand for Solaris on Intel.

If that is true, it was a stroke of genius and a brave move that risked short-term criticism for long-term gain. If not, it goes to prove that good things can come from bad decisions.

Given Sun’s experience, there are a couple of points that should be considered when judging the progress of other proprietary vendors towards open source: it’s a long and winding road, and all is not necessarily as it appears.