Nope, it was a bit weirder than that. I started work on it after Sun had signed the agreement to merge System V and SunOS with AT&T. We were beavering away on it as the Zeus Name Service (ZNS) (Zeus was the code name for Solaris 2.0, aka the first merged product) and after a while it became obvious to AT&T there was this thing in the Sun product that wasn't in the 'merged' product. We explained to them what it was and they said "Well we want that in our product too." and Ed Zander said, "Well we couldn't possibly agree to that without more money from you guys." And they said "How much?" and Ed quoted them some multi-million dollar sum (I wasn't privy to the actual conversation and have heard different numbers for it), and they said "Ok fine."
To say that it surprised Ed would be an understatement, and it set off a series of events that left me feeling pretty unsatisfied. The first thing it did was bring attention to the next version of the ONC product which was going to include NFS V3 and NIS+ and nominally just ship to customers. Except that now NIS+ was "valuable" SunSoft (the sub-company in Sun responsible for Solaris) didn't want to just _give_ it away (original plan) they could charge big bucks for it. So they rechristened it to ONC+ and wrapped some egregious license terms around this "new" product. That lead to a ferocious debate inside of the company, fractured relationships with long term ONC licensees (like SGI and HP), and an edict to not ship it on SunOS 4.1 to "encourage" adoption of Solaris 2.0. I would have left Sun at that point if James Gosling hadn't recruited me to come work on project Green, aka Java.
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Nope, it was a bit weirder than that. I started work on it after Sun had signed the agreement to merge System V and SunOS with AT&T. We were beavering away on it as the Zeus Name Service (ZNS) (Zeus was the code name for Solaris 2.0, aka the first merged product) and after a while it became obvious to AT&T there was this thing in the Sun product that wasn't in the 'merged' product. We explained to them what it was and they said "Well we want that in our product too." and Ed Zander said, "Well we couldn't possibly agree to that without more money from you guys." And they said "How much?" and Ed quoted them some multi-million dollar sum (I wasn't privy to the actual conversation and have heard different numbers for it), and they said "Ok fine."
To say that it surprised Ed would be an understatement, and it set off a series of events that left me feeling pretty unsatisfied. The first thing it did was bring attention to the next version of the ONC product which was going to include NFS V3 and NIS+ and nominally just ship to customers. Except that now NIS+ was "valuable" SunSoft (the sub-company in Sun responsible for Solaris) didn't want to just _give_ it away (original plan) they could charge big bucks for it. So they rechristened it to ONC+ and wrapped some egregious license terms around this "new" product. That lead to a ferocious debate inside of the company, fractured relationships with long term ONC licensees (like SGI and HP), and an edict to not ship it on SunOS 4.1 to "encourage" adoption of Solaris 2.0. I would have left Sun at that point if James Gosling hadn't recruited me to come work on project Green, aka Java.