Sun to free Solaris, sort of...
Sun is expected to make its "free Solaris" campaign the centerpiece of its Solaris 8 unveiling, which takes place this Wednesday in New York City. At that event, Sun also is expected to announce it will open up access to Solaris 8 source code.
Solaris 8 is due to ship in February, around the same time Microsoft is due to ship Windows 2000.
McNealy: Set It Free
Sun CEO Scott McNealy has been laying the groundwork for the announcement for months by telling audiences that software is a service and should be free. McNealy recommended last year that the government require Microsoft to make free and open its application program interfaces, rather than break itself into pieces, as a preferred remedy in the current Department of Justice vs. Microsoft antitrust investigation.
"Free" is a relative term, however. Sun in December eliminated fees for Java 2 Standard Edition but still requires developers to pay for compatibility tests required to maintain their licenses. And Linux advocates and other industry watchers have claimed that the Sun Community Source License is not as free or open as Linux and other open-source licenses are.
Sun will pitch Solaris 8 against Microsoft's high-end Windows 2000 package called Windows 2000 Datacenter, which is in beta and won't be commercially available until midyear, at best.
Sun in November announced a free early access version of Solaris 8. Sun is positioning Solaris 8 as the most scalable and reliable network operating system on the market. Microsoft, which stepped up its Windows 2000 marketing campaign within the past week, in anticipation of the Feb. 17 rollout of the product, is touting Windows 2000's reliability as its main selling point.
Zander: We'll Never Do Linux
Microsoft's not Sun's only worry. Sun must fend off growing encroachments by Linux, which not only is free but also is becoming more robust with help from Sun competitors IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard.
Sun President Ed Zander told financial analysts last week that Sun will never adopt Linux as its operating system but will instead "put every ounce of R&D we have into Solaris."
"It amazes me to watch IBM and all those other companies chase Linux the way they did Windows NT five years ago," Zander said.
Sun has been working for over a year to offer Solaris under the Sun Community Source License but was stymied by the fact that it didn't own all the intellectual property inside Solaris. SCSL is a quasi open-source license that requires developers to return bug fixes to Sun, maintain compatibility, and pay fees to Sun when they ship binaries based on Sun source code.
It is unclear how Sun has resolved its intellectual property issues. But that isn't stopping the company from working to get on the good side of the open-source community. Sun is sponsoring ApacheCon 2000, the first official conference of the Apache Software Foundation upcoming in March, and is helping with the Apache Foundation's Jakarta and Java Apache projects.