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Danyll Wills

Sun Microsystems has committed to putting its Unix operating system, Solaris, into the open-source community.

The surprise revelation was made in Shanghai last week by Sun chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz  and his executive vice-president  for software,  John Loiacono.

'I'd like you all to understand this clearly: we will open-source Solaris,' Mr Schwartz said. 'We will deploy open standards to give developers choice.'

Mr Loiacono backed up his boss in no uncertain terms.

'It is not if, it is when,' he said. 'We will do it shortly. It will take a little time to clean up all the issues, but you will get an open-source version of Solaris shortly.'

The implications could be considerable. Gong Li, director of Sun's engineering laboratory in Beijing, said the announcement should make clear the company's support and commitment to open source.

Meanwhile, it remains to be seen how Sun will accomplish an open-source release given that the operating system contains much code licensed from other companies. Considering the legal battles between SCO, which claims to own Unix, and the Linux community, Sun would not put itself at any risk, Mr Loiacono said.

'We paid our licence fee to SCO many years ago, and it will not be a problem,' he said.

Mr Schwartz made it clear the main target was Red Hat.

'There is a big difference between open source and open standards,' he said. 'There is one Linux company in the world today that is confusing the two, and it's very dangerous. It's Red Hat,' he said.

Sun has supported open standards since its founding in 1982, when it sold machines with Ethernet connectivity and software that allowed them to connect to others. That move created an ipso facto standard for networking. The announcement in Shanghai appears to be an attempt to do something similar with Solaris.

Mr Schwartz was unrelenting in his attack on Red Hat.

'They are saying that 'because we are open source, we are an open standard',' he said. 'Just because the source code is free and available does not mean you pay nothing or that you are an open standard.

'And customers have figured that out, now that they are paying US$2,000 a box for that 'free' operating system. They are losing track of something we have always been focused on: open standards enable substitution and choice. What Red Hat has been able to say is: 'We are open source and therefore it is an open standard. You don't need anybody else.' And customers are feeling locked in,' he said.

Mr Schwartz said the Sun model would do with Solaris what it had accomplished with Java: create a community of developers.

'You need only look to what we have done with Java to understand how Sun views incorporating community feedback. Java could not exist if only Sun were supporting it. It exists because hundreds of thousands of partners are evolving it. We must now take the model we used for Java and bring it to Solaris,' he said.

Sun recently announced plans for subscription-based purchases of Solaris.

'We have already adjusted our pricing so we now have subscription pricing for Solaris that is significantly less expensive than Red Hat and 80 per cent less expensive than Microsoft,' Mr Schwartz said.



Sun vows to place Solaris in the open-source community