Several open source developers remain skeptical toward Sun Microsystems because their memories of the company revolve around its interactions, or lack of, with the community between 2001 and 2002.
Sun's chief open source officer, Simon Phipps, now concedes that was a period in which Sun "screwed up".
Speaking in a recent interview with ZDNet Asia's sister site Builder AU, Phipps explained the situation in which Sun finds itself: "Open source developers have been much more skeptical of Sun; a lot of open source developers don't remember the fact that Sun was pretty much the first open source startup, in 1982."
"All they can remember is what happened from 2001 to 2002 when, to be quite frank with you, we screwed up. We alienated a large group of open source developers by the attitudes we had of the community back then," he said.
In order to remedy the alienation, Phipps said Sun is "leading by changing behavior, rather than by just saying good words".
Most of Sun's software portfolio has shown the company's commitment to open source, and begun to heal the rift, he added.
"We've open sourced Java...and people see that and they say: 'Wow...you must be serious,'" he said.
"That has meant that a lot of open source developers have been willing to take a second look at Sun and give us credit for open sourcing Solaris, Java, the application server GlassFish, NetBeans and the rest of the portfolio," Phipps added.
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