Sun to publish Solaris source code

By agencies   |   Wednesday, 15 June 2005, 19:30 IST
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SAN FRANCISCO: Sun Microsystems Inc. has said it will start publishing the source code for its Solaris operating system used to run large computer centers. The computer maker hopes the free software will drive sales of its servers and computer services. The move by Sun makes good on a pledge that Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's chief operating officer, made in June 2004 at a Sun show in Shanghai. Sun, which has suffered longer than rivals IBM, Hewlett-Packard Co. and Dell Inc. since the dot-com and telecommunications busts in early 2001, said that the source code for Solaris, networking and system libraries and commands will be free available. By making the underlying code to Solaris freely available to software developers and the market at large, Sun aims to broaden the total available market for Sun's computer servers and computer services. "The more people who run Unix and Solaris and open Solaris, the larger the opportunity is to sell the hardware, infrastructure and services necessary to put it into deployment," Schwartz said in a telephone interview. "Open source doesn't mean no revenue, it means no barriers to (growing) revenue," he added. Solaris is one of the major versions of the Unix operating system used in heavy-duty computing environments, such as financial services, air traffic control, and other transaction-laden computer processes. Solaris competes against the Windows operating system from Microsoft Corp., International Business Machines Corp's version of Unix called AIX and HP's Unix variant called HP-UX. It also competes against Linux, a freely available operating system based on Unix that can be modified and improved by a large community of developers.

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