[wellylug] Sun confirms plans to open source Solaris

[Simon Anderson]

On Wed, 2 Jun 2004, Wood Brent wrote:
> Interesting. Seems to be a response to the competitive threat to Solaris posed
> by both Windows & Linux. 

Windows and Linux aren't the competitive threat per se, because Solaris 
outclasses both of them by quite some distance. 

The threat (more than a threat, one could argue this is a battle Sun has 
already lost) is to Sparc RISC technology from commodity x86. 

Open Sourcing (which in Sun's case != GPL) Solaris and expanding deals 
with hardware manufacturers like they just did with Fujitsu are an effort 
to breathe life into the Sparc platform.

Sun after all, (as their drunken VP of Marketing for Europe confessed to 
me one 4am) sells tin.

>I wonder if HPUX, Compaq, SGI, etc. will follow suit

Where SGI (XFS anyone?) HPUX and IBM have donated code directly to the 
core of Linux, particularly the kernel, Sun tend to donate to F/OSS 
projects which are cross platform, that can *also* be used by Solaris, 
such as GNOME. 

The difference between Sun and the other traditional Unix vendors is that 
Solaris is still in the game.

-Simon.