Sun Founder Bids Farewell to the Company He Started 28 Years Ago

As the Oracle, Sun acquisition drama winds down after the EU approved the deal, it marks the end of a 28-year era for Sun as an independent company. While the finishing touches are being put on the deal and Oracle is shaping up its future plans for the newly acquired company, Sun founder and CEO for 24 of the 28 years, Scott McNealy, bids his farewell to the company and its employees in his characteristic style.

The former CEO, now chairman of the Silicon Valley technology company, sent a memo to all Sun employees, the ones left anyway after the latest round of layoffs, dropping the PR talk for an honest and sometimes nostalgic message.

"So, to be honest, this is not a note this founder wants to write. Sun, in my mind, should have been the great and surviving consolidator. But I love the market economy and capitalism more than I love my company," McNealy, who describes himself as "a big mouth who is always ready with a clever quip," writes.

The founder goes on to list some of the things he thinks made Sun a great company even if not the most successful financially. "First and foremost, Sun innovated like crazy. We took it to the limit (see Eagles). And though we did not monetize our inventions as well as we could have, few companies have the track record in R&D that we had over the last 28 years. This made working at Sun really cool. Thanks to all of you inventors and risk takers who changed how we live," he writes.

He also says he is proud that the company managed to achieve all it did without breaking the law or the "rules of decency" and without lying, cheating or appealing any other sleazy business practice. And even though it could have brought in more, Sun still managed to get $200 billion-worth of revenue over the years and made it into the Fortune 200 list.

As Oracle prepares to start the new chapter in Sun's history, McNealy urges employees to help Oracle do great things with Sun. You can read the entire letter over at Cnet. Oracle made a bid for the company last spring, offering $7.4 billion. The deal went through a prolonged review process as the EU regulators wanted to make sure that MySQL's future was assured under Oracle.