They are a hardware company. Why would they want people to clone their hardware is beyond me. The IBM PC was cloned and the result is that IBM is a relatively minor player in the PC arena and one that has no meaningful power (much unlike Intel and Microsoft).
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It was Intel that gained from cloning, and IBM then suffered, you're right. But MS had the APIs into it for Windows so it gained.
The idea was that Sun becomes a designer of and licensor of state-of-the-art HW designs (which it may or may not implement). The designs come with software APIs too that different companies may want to implement.
The difficulty is that SPARC International is already a different organization to Sun. So, I don't know if they could've done this legally.
There is one nice way to boost Sun's survivability: to get the server room rid of Windows boxes - a segment where Sun can't compete. To deploy a solution that currently runs on Linux/x86 on a SPARC/Solaris or even SPARC/Linux is really easy and Sun makes some wicked fast machines for when you need throughput and not single-thread performance. To do it with Windows is a whole lot harder. The good thing: we would get performance and reliability, and in exchange, we would get rid of Windows (and, of course, Exchange and Outlook).
A second, interesting way, would be if Sun decided to make inexpensive SPARC desktops based on their T1 or T2 designs that encourage people to develop massively multi-threaded applications that run best in spaces where x86 boxes can't go just yet (and won't go until at least Larrabee). But they need to run and build something sexy like a Mac mini and they need it by last year or so. I doubt they could pull this one off.
As for me, I am going to stockpile Sun type 6 USB keyboards and matching mice, just to ensure my ability to have a keyboard with keys labeled Help, Stop, Again...