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Sun to Share Its Code for a Key System

Posted on: Monday, 7 June 2004, 06:00 CDT

Executives of Sun Microsystems have told customers that the company will do what once would have been unthinkable: turn its proprietary operating system, Solaris, into open source software.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's newly appointed president, told corporate customers in Shanghai last week that the company had decided to release source code from its Solaris operating system through an open source license, the same free distribution strategy promoted by the developers of Linux.

Sun, based in California, declined to provide details on how the move would affect its overall business model or whether the company would provide all or only parts of the source code through an open source license. Sun has always held tight control over Solaris, its proprietary network operating system for server computers.

Over the past few years, Sun has lost considerable market share in the server market to computers running Linux and Windows, which are often less expensive than the kind of specialized hardware and software sold by Sun. The impact of Sun's decision will depend on just how far Sun decides to take the new approach, analysts said.

"There are more questions than answers at this point," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at Raymond James & Co. For developers in the open source community, Sun's decision is striking, given that it was their frustration with tightly controlled programs like Solaris that led to the rise of the open source model.

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