By year's end, it
plans to finalize a sweeping plan to make its software available as
open source, including a version of Solaris.
...
In perhaps its
boldest and riskiest move, the company plans to transform its
proprietary software stack into open source that's available at no
cost. In some ways, the move to open-source Solaris brings Sun full
circle. In 1982, McNealy and colleagues founded Sun to sell a
commercial version of a free Unix operating system. By putting a
version of Solaris back into the public domain, Sun hopes to
reinvigorate demand for its servers and broaden its ecosystem of Java
developers....
Sun won't be
going halfway. The company will offer "a major portion, if not all, of
our software foundation" as open source, says John Loiacono, the
executive VP in charge of Sun's software group, adding that it will do
so using an industry-norm license, "not some one-off specialty
license." Sun is betting it can make money from service and support
agreements, not unlike Red Hat Inc.'s approach to Linux. "If you want
it fully supported or want input into new features, then you might have
to pay for that," Loiacono says....
Sun's CTO, Greg
Papadopoulos, and Microsoft's chairman and chief
software architect, Bill Gates, have been working closely the past few
months on a road map to bridge the Sun and Microsoft environments.
