Sun did announced "NeWS is Free (only $1000)" which was kind of a kick in the balls and abuse of the word "free".
"Free (only $1000)" discussion on usenet:
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.news/c/-G1l_372AP8/...
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.windows.news/c/YtZzYMZ587M/...
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.org.sug/c/IXcXK7hKgUQ/m/nf8...
A couple of my flames about the situation:
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/Explanation.txt
https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/sevans.txt
And to cleanse the palette, DSRH's epic "Sun Deskset == Roy Lichtenstein Painting on your Bedroom Wall" flame (David SH Rosenthal was one of the original authors of NeWS, with James Gosling, and also wrote the X11 ICCCM):
I think a modern take on NeWS style system would use Webassembly style system with capability based access rather then PostScript and no security. Basically a modern browser with Canves/WebGL and without a lot of other stuff a browser does.
Would have been a interesting alternative to the Wayland approach.
Kind of sad that Scott McNealy didn't have the balls to open it up. Having some real competition to X in the 90s would have been a cool. Specially if Sun had pushed it at least somewhat.
