News about Sun Microsystem's Linux efforts

 IBM Pays Customers To Ditch Sun Servers, May 04, 2009

Big Blue is doubling a rewards program under which businesses can get thousands of dollars worth of software and services for free -- if they unplug their Sun boxes.

Oracle's acquisition of Sun raised a lot of questions about the future of Sun's core technologies. Oracle says that it is committed to Solaris and Java, but some open source advocates are concerned about the implications for OpenOffice.org and MySQL.

Everyone who has cheerfully been using OpenOffice for the past seven or eight years must face the prospect that the new owners will drop the project.

With an acquisition by IBM now out of the question, former Silicon Valley icon Sun Microsystems faces one challenge after another from competitors looking to eat into the Santa Clara company's market share.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, Ian Murdock, vice president of developer and community marketing at Sun Microsystems, and Sam Ramji, director of platform strategy at Microsoft, all made cases for their respective platforms in front of delegates at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.

Like any star past its prime, Sun Microsystems is left with two choices: It can burn out, or it can fade away.

It appears that the IBM/Sun deal is dead in the water. This wouldn't be the first, or last, time people threatened to walk out of a deal as a negotiating tactic. IBM buying Sun is the best possible thing that could happen to Sun and its product lines. Sun has been dying for years. The market, which has seen Sun's stock drop 79% in 2008 alone, certainly knows it.

By this time next week, IBM will have bought Sun at a cut-rate price. What happens next though? Specifically, what's going to happen to Sun's product lines?

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz has put forward a compelling argument as to how Sun will monetize open-source software. Fortunately, he may never need to, as it seems all-but-certain that IBM will acquire Sun, perhaps as early as this week, according to sources familiar with the matter.

They're concerned about the fate of Sun's developer tools, open-source projects

Sun Open Cloud Platform to Power Public and Private Clouds with Leading Open Technologies Java, MySQL, OpenSolaris and Open Storage; Sets Course for World with Many Open and Compatible Clouds; Sun Also Announces Plans to Launch First Public Cloud for Developers, Students and Startups

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, didn't mince his words when stating his opinion of Solaris, Sun's operating system, to InfoWorld. "The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows. It is not Unix or Solaris", he said, claiming that there were hardly any new Solaris installations, ever more Solaris users were migrating to Linux on cost grounds, OEM manufacturers were turning away from Solaris, and Sun was in financial difficulties.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is announcing on Wednesday availability of Sun Web Stack, which puts the company's own twist on the popular open-source LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python or PHP) stack.

Many open source developers remain sceptical of Sun because their memories of the company focus on Sun's interactions with the community in 2001/2002, which Sun's chief open source officer Simon Phipps concedes was a period where Sun "screwed up".

Sun Microsystems is stepping up efforts to boost Java usage in Linux shops by working to remove some final encumbrances in the open-source Java platform.

Looking to boost the Web, Sun is working on a royalty-free and open video codec and media system, company officials said Thursday afternoon.

Sun formally completed its acquisition of MySQL on Tuesday. I was fortunate to spend 15 minutes on the phone with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun, after the press conference.

Sun Microsystems said Tuesday that it has completed its acquisition of open-source database company MySQL for about $1 billion--and now is turning its attention to other acquisitions.

Jonathan Schwartz, its ponytail-wearing chief, has turned the company around by focusing on free software for new business

Some people can't believe Sun actually spent a billion dollars for MySQL; I can't believe they got such a great deal.

The purchase of mySQL completes Sun’s transformation into an open source company.

Sun Microsystems has purchased MySQL and released Java under the GPL. Chief executive Jonathan Schwartz has also speculated that there could be a future release of Solaris under the GPL, but what are the implications of such a move.

Sun is expected to announce next week that it will make the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) device platform available via open source, but a user expressed concerns about Sun's commitment to the technology.

Sun Microsystems Inc. agreed to buy software company MySQL AB for $1 billion and also said Wednesday that profit exceeded analysts' estimates last quarter, sending its shares higher.

Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has deployed a Linux-based High Performance Cluster from Sun Microsystems to run its reservoir simulation software, increase its processing power, and enable the company to take critical business decisions faster than ever before.

Sun Microsystems is offering distributors and OEMs backline support for the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, which is a free alternative to its own branded StarOffice offering.

After releasing the multicore, multithreaded chip earlier this year, Sun plans to release the UltraSPARC T2's source code to the open-source community.

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday will release details of a new award program meant to spur growth and activity within the company's open-source efforts, according to a post by Sun's open-source officer, Simon Phipps, on his corporate blog.

Sun Microsystems will release its xVM Ops Center virtualisation management application under the General Public Licence version 3 (GPLv3), the company revealed at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco.

In his latest blog post the chief executive of Sun, Jonathan Schwartz, offered "heartfelt congratulations" to Google on the announcement of its new Java/Linux phone platform, Android.

Sun’s “open source road map” is to make OpenSolaris a viable alternative to enterprise Linux through a simpler install package and alliances in the enterprise open source space.

With an incremental update to its Solaris 10 OS, Sun is extending the platform's virtualization capabilities to accommodate Linux and Solaris on the same computer.

Sun Microsystems has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java.

When Solaris Containers for Linux Applications is released into the source code with Update 4 on Aug. 27, Sun customers will be able to run unmodified Linux binaries made for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS.

Sun Microsystems, the world's third-largest maker of computer servers for businesses, said on Monday it swung to a quarterly profit from a year-earlier loss as it reduced costs, sending the shares higher.

We went to OSCON, hoping to uncover some fresh details on Sun Microsystems' "Project Indiana." We mostly failed in this endeavor.

Sun's ODF plug-in can play an important role in broadening interoperability between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office.

Sun Microsystems is revamping its Solaris operating system, incorporating key pieces of rival Linux software in a move that could gain better support from developers who have massed behind Linux.

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz will not discuss GNU general public license version 3, but will share his fantasy concerning open source licensing.

A Linux kernel programmer has got Linux running on a logical domain, Sun Microsystems' term for an operating system partition on its newer UltraSparc-based servers.

ZFS, like the rest of OpenSolaris, has been available under Sun's Common Development and Distribution License for about two years, and Linux has been under Version 2 of the the GNU General Public License since its first release in 1991. The licenses are incompatible

Back in the beginning of SCO's all-out assault on Linux and IBM, the Unix company received a much needed financial boost to its lawsuit plans with two major contracts. These deals with Microsoft and Sun brought SCO $26.5 million. This money, in turn, fueled SCO's lawsuits.

Sun has unveiled compiler and tool technologies that work on multicore chip architectures and extend to application development on Linux.

Sun Microsystems has moved one mailing list posting closer to explaining how it plans to mimic the Linux distribution model with OpenSolaris.

Sun Microsystems' Chief Open Source Officer, Simon Phipps, spoke on the issues of software patents, patent reform and Microsoft's claims that free and open-source software infringes the software company's patents. Phipps spoke with eWEEK Senior Editor Darryl K. Taft.

You have to take a look at Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog today. He has pledged the company will use its patents to defend Red Hat and Ubuntu.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has blunted whatever public niceties existed between his company and Microsoft with a revealing attack on Redmond's lawsuit threats around open source software.

In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun Microsystems has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of the trappings of Linux.

Telecom equipment maker Ericsson said on Tuesday it would join forces with U.S. computer maker Sun Microsystems to develop an open source Java technology-based multimedia application server.

In an effort to spur adoption of Solaris, Sun Microsystems has begun a project code-named Indiana to try to give its operating system some of the trappings of Linux.

 View older news this year: Jul Jun May Apr Mar Feb Jan
 View news from other years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001, 2000, 1999
 View older news in category Sun this year: May Apr Mar
 View Sun news from other years: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003