In Brief: Rogue Wave Software partners with Sun
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Rogue Wave Software and Sun Microsystems have formed an alliance intended to help enterprises quickly and easily migrate legacy applications to Sun's Solaris 10 OS. The agreement calls for Rogue Wave to port and certify its enterprise C++ development toolkits including SourcePro Core, SourcePro Net, SourcePro DB, SourcePro Analysis, and Rogue Wave LEIF on Solaris 10 for both Sparc- and AMD Opteron-based systems. These tools are particularly aimed at helping help developers in the financial services, telecommunications, and government sectors to migrate existing Windows apps and develop new applications on Solaris 10.
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Sun signs up the software company to support its attempt to make useful a version of its Solaris operating system for x86 chips.
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Sun Microsystems has acquired enterprise applications management company SevenSpace, allowing its managed services arm to support HP-UX and IBM&#39;s AIX systems for the first time.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. has agreed to buy open-source software maker MySQL AB for $1 billion, beefing up the server maker's database offerings with a company whose technology is used by some of the world's biggest Web sites.
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(InfoWorld) - Red Hat and Exadel are joining forces to try to make the open source Red Hat platform more of a destination for software developers. The two companies will offer Eclipse-based developer tools for building applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat and Exadel said. "If you take a look at where Red Hat's business was a couple years ago, it was primarily around migration of production systems to Enterprise Linux," said Brian Che, Red Hat product manager. But now, Red Hat wants developers to build new applications, Che said. This week's announcement follows last year's purchase of JBoss as part of Red Hat's strategy. Through an arrangement being announced at the EclipseCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif., on Monday, Exadel will open source all of its products, including the Exadel Studio Pro Web development environment and the RichFaces AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components platform. Exadel Studio Pro, which is based on the Eclipse platform, will be renamed Red Hat Developer Studio. Also, Exadel's Ajax4jsf, which is a framework for JavaServer Faces applications that use AJAX, will be consolidated under the JBoss.org umbrella. Red Hat will work with Exadel to drive development of these projects and integrate them with JBoss middleware technologies such as the JBoss Seam application framework. In offering its products via open source, Exadel is seeking to increase awareness of its technologies and sell application-building services around them. "We believe that this gives us more visibility," said Donna Burke, Exadel vice president. Red Hat, meanwhile, will support the products itself. The Red Hat and Exadel arrangement provides a new twist on partnerships in that it is not an acquisition and provides just a potential for future revenues from services, said Raven Zachary, senior analyst with The 451 Group. "Here you've got two commercial firms exchanging IP (intellectual property) with only a promise of revenue-sharing in the future. It's a fascinating model," Zachary said. "There's a risk here for Exadel," in giving away its IP, but Exadel believes the move provides greater opportunities, Zachary said. RichFaces and Ajax4jsf provide models for building rich Internet and Web 2.0 applications, Red Hat said. When combining these Exadel developer tools with JBoss Enterprise Middleware, Red Hat can offer a development and deployment platform for developers to assemble SOA components and Web 2.0 applications with less coding, Red Hat and Exadel said. RichFaces and Ajax4jsf are available now as JBoss RichFaces and JBoss Ajax4jsf on JBoss.org under the LGPL (Lesser GNU General Public License). Red Hat is working to open source Exadel Studio Pro as Red Hat Developer Studio under the GNU GPL (General Public License), with availability planned for later in the first half of 2007. Red Hat also plans to introduce a Red Hat developer assistance program. The effort will feature a developer portal that at present has been known by the code name of 108. Also at EclipseCon, AccuRev plans to announce enhancements to its AccuBridge for Eclipse plug, allowing Eclipse developers to access AccuRev software configuration management functionality from within the Eclipse IDE. Performance and usability enhancements in version 4.5.1 of the plug-in include the ability to synchronize a local development workspace with other developers' changes, a customizable AccuRev perspective to view the collection of windows most important to developers, and support for the Eclipse Update Manager. AccuRev also plans to announce it has hired David Jabs as vice president of engineering. He was a founding architect of IBM Rational ClearCase while at Atria Software, AccuRev said.
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Sun plans to release most of the OS code to an open-source community development process. The company also promises a Red Hat Linux execution environment (the Janus project) by 1Q05.
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SAN FRANCISCO -- Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to buy open-source software maker MySQL AB for $1 billion, beefing up the server maker's database offerings with a company whose technology is used by some of the world's biggest Web sites.
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roundup Plus: Sun draws Nvidia graphics into Solaris...Tibco scoops up software company...PeopleSoft extends customer assurance.
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Distro dysfunction junction Sun Microsystems has moved one mailing list posting closer to explaining how it plans to mimic the Linux distribution model with OpenSolaris.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - SunÂ has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavor to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS. Sun's Java programming language, which debuted in 1995, is present in most of today's PCs, mobile devices, and embedded systems. The vendor is now seeking that same kind of omnipresence for Solaris, its flavor of Unix. Sun intends to take the operating system into markets where it hasn't traditionally been a force, such as desktop and embedded systems, according to Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solaris marketing at Sun. The vendor is also keen toÂ position OpenSolaris as a real alternative to Linux. "There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris," said Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun. He joined Sun in March after serving as the CTO of the Linux Foundation. Murdock's also the creator of the Debian Linux distribution and is keen to take the lessons he's learned in the Linux community and apply them to Solaris. Sun is preparing to release OpenSolaris binaries early next year in a distribution code-named "Project Indiana" that will be similar to Linux distributions. The work, which is getting under way in the OpenSolaris community, is aimed at creating a single CD installation of the basic OS and desktop environment, giving developers the option to install additional software from network repositories. Developers also will be able to create limited releases of the distribution targeted at attendees of a particular event. The whole idea behind Indiana is to build more of a developer community around Solaris, Murdock said. "How can we lower the barriers to programmers and run OpenSolaris as an ideal open-source operating system not originating from Sun?" he asked. Indiana will also enable faster release cycles with a new version appearing every six months. With Indiana in place, Sun will adopt a two-tier development model, Murdock said, establishing a clear path from Indiana and OpenSolaris -- for developers and early adopters -- to Solaris, which will be largely used by more conservative enterprise users. The challenge will be delivering what's effectively a single Solaris platform to two very different communities, he added. Sun has already managed various versions of Java, including mobile, standard, and enterprise editions of the software. But whereas with Java the challenge was getting developers interested in a new technology, with Solaris, Sun needs to appeal to people who may have had previous negative experiences with the OS. Founded in 2004, online messaging security provider DigiTar begun life as an all-Linux shop using Suse Linux, according to Jason Williams, CTO and COO of the Boise, Idaho, company. "We had a very anti-Sun bias," he said, dating back to the frustration he and a colleague experienced in college trying to use Solaris 8, which they quickly abandoned in favor of Suse. However, DigiTar ran into problems with the way Linux handled a storage subsystem in 2005. With OpenSolaris freely available, they tried out the OS and it worked well. "Solaris has resolved a lot of issues that Linux is just getting hit by," Williams said. Over time, DigiTar has made use of new Solaris features such as DTrace and ZFS (Zettabyte File System), which have helped the company quickly pin down the locations of performance bottlenecks and better optimize the system. "Our experience with Solaris has been very evolutionary," Williams said. "We came for one thing, then other benefits emerged." "We very much want to move to Indiana," Williams said, because it will fix two immediate issues DigiTar has with OpenSolaris: Ease of use and ease of installation. The company's keen to migrate all its software to Solaris, but compiling applications on Solaris has always been a little different from compiling on a GNU Linux distribution. Today, about 60 percent of its software runs on Gentoo Linux, versus 40 percent on OpenSolaris. Indiana will support GNU userland, the part of an application that requests system activities from the operating system kernel, making it easier to move Linux applications to Solaris. The other feature Indiana offers over previous versions of OpenSolaris is its packaging so it can be more easily installed. Williams is impressed by the community that's already grown up around OpenSolaris. "It's the most productive community I've ever been a part of," he said, with a posted query drawing 4 to 5 informed responses within an hour from both third parties and Sun engineers. Sun's approach to open source is "very mature and adult," Williams added, largely because Sun engineers are used to fielding customers' questions and know it's important to respond rapidly. In order to win other converts, Williams recommends that Sun go back to school. "The key thing they need to do is get back into the colleges," he said. "That's where we formed our opinion of Sun." Making Solaris easy to use and highlighting useful tools such as DTrace could go a long way toward wooing developers, Williams added. Sun is encouraging more use of OpenSolaris in universities with plans to add 500 more Campus Ambassadors around the world to the several hundred that were already in academia, Hamilton said. The Ambassadors are students who receive free training and support from Sun and then establish open-source developer communities in their colleges and evangelize OpenSolaris and Java to their peers and teachers. Williams also recommends letting Indiana "splinter" so that developers can freely create their own distributions and further spread the Solaris technology. Sun hopes that if it establishes Indiana as a reference platform for OpenSolaris, people are less likely to seek out or develop other distributions, Hamilton said. "With Linux, what happened was there was a void and people filled it," Murdock said, referring to the large number of Linux distributions in the market. "Everything we do here is to allow for flexibility, so there is the possibility of multiple distributions." Going after developers is only one of several strategies Sun is pursuing to raise the profile of Solaris. The vendor's also keen to increase the number of hardware platforms on which the OS is available on. Earlier this month, in a deal that would have been unthinkable a few years back,Â IBM, one of Sun's main hardware rivals, agreed to redistribute Solaris OS and Solaris Subscriptions for some of its System x and BladeCenter servers. From IBM's perspective, the move is in line with its pledge to offer users a range of operating systems and also will enable the vendor to make money on support calls involving Solaris running on IBM hardware. Hamilton said Sun's in discussions with about 40 original equipment manufacturers to make the OS available on their hardware. The companies include smaller hardware vendors that operate in particular geographies, but he's also interested in having IBM-like relationships with HP and Dell.
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Sun Microsystems sta in effetti lavorando a un nuovo modello di licensing per Solaris, denominato Common Development and Distribution License (Cddl), e ne ha presentato le specifiche alla Open Source Initiative.
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InfoWorld - Sun Microsystems will pay $1 billion for Swedish software company MySQL, whose open-source database is used for some of the most widely visited Web sites in the world.
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(InfoWorld) - Sun MicrosystemsÂ has released a new version of its Java Enterprise System (Java ES) set of subscription-based enterprise middleware with the emphasis on making the offering more modular. The vendor unveiled Java ES 5.0 Thursday, the first major release of the bundleÂ since October 2005. The offering brings Sun's infrastructure software, support and training together into a single product and is aimed at companies looking to purchase the vendor's middleware at a gradual, predictable rate. Java ES is also available in the form of individual software suites known collectively as Java System Suites. "Java ES 5.0 continues a lot of what we started four years ago," said Jim McHugh, vice president of software infrastructure at Sun. In 2003, the vendor introduced what became Java ES as Project Orion as a way for customers to buy an integrated middleware stack made available on a regular quarterly release cycle. Users can begin by buying the Java ES 5.0 Base for $100 per employee per year, which includes Sun's application, portal, and Web servers, and then choose to add on subscriptions for Sun's Java System Identity Manager or its Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). Adding in identity management brings the annual cost per user to $140, which then increases to $200 when Java CAPS is also included. Sun sees its prime middleware competitor as IBM with its WebSphere offering. "They have the same breadth of software we offer, but we did our [product] integration three years ago," McHugh said. As Oracle continuesÂ integrating its Fusion middleware, it'll also be more of a significant Sun rival, he added. Major enhancements in Java ES 5.0 include work on a monitoring console and monitoring framework and a common installer for the software components, McHugh said. The vendor is also keen to incorporate more of its own and third-party open-source components in its middleware. Java ES already includes Java DB, Sun's supported distribution of the open-source Apache Derby database. The middleware also supports the PostgreSQL open-source database. Sun now lays claim to more than 1.3 million subscribers for Java ES compared to the nearly 1 million it declared in October 2005. When Sun released Java ES 4.0 in 2005, the major focus for the new version was the additional support of operating systems from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. As well as Windows and HP-UX, Java ES supports Sun's Solaris and Red Hat's Enterprise Linux. Sun is continuing to debate whether Java ES should also support the other leading Linux distribution, Suse from Novell, McHugh said, and is seeing demand from some European users. Although Sun doesn't support IBM's AIX across the entire breadth of its middleware stack, many elements of Java ES do support the IBM operating system, he added. Java ES users include credit reporting company Equifax, auto manufacturer General Motors, health-care insurance company Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts and Australian telecom carrier Telstra Corp., McHugh said.
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With Sun Microsystems set to detail its plans for Solaris 10 on Monday, Sun President and COO Jonathan Schwartz spoke with Computerworld about what the company has up its open-source sleeve.
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Sun announced Tuesday that it is buying Innotek, maker of VirtualBox, virtualization software that may have more value for software developers than datacenter administrators.Steve Wilson, vice president of&#160;Sun&#39;s nascent xVM virtualization line, called the purchase a &quot;huge deal&quot; for xVM and &quot;even Sun as a whole,&quot; on his official blog Tuesday. Terms of the deal to buy the German company, expected to close in Sun&#39;s fiscal third quarter, were not disclosed.&quot;VirtualBox is software designed to allow users to run multiple operating systems on top of whatever OS they currently have installed,&quot; he wrote. &quot;Whether you choose Windows, Mac, Linux, or Solaris as your default desktop of choice, VirtualBox will ride on top of it and allow you to &#39;host&#39; any arbitrary collection of operating system instances. Software developers everywhere are starting to discover this way of operating, and these desktop virtualization solutions are quickly becoming part of the common developer toolkit.&quot;&quot;While there are other applications that provide this capability, VirtualBox is free, open source, and supports a wide range of operating systems,&quot; Wilson added. The software has been downloaded more than 4 million times since it was released roughly one year ago, according to Sun.VirtualBox may sound similar to Sun&#39;s own xVM Server, but the two products are targeted at different markets, Wilson said. xVM Server, announced in November, is a hypervisor that installs on top of the hardware. &quot;It&#39;s a purpose-built software appliance with functionality to enable server consolidation and dynamic IT. ... This is datacenter grade virtualization,&quot; he said.In comparison, VirtualBox is &quot;a software developer&#39;s dream,&quot; he said. &quot;You can easily set up multiple virtual machines to develop and test your multitier or cross platform applications -- all on a single box. ... Where xVM Server is competitive with something like VMware ESX Server, VirtualBox is more like VMware Workstation/Fusion or Parallels Desktop.&quot;The product will continue to be free, and for strategic reasons, according to Wilson. &quot;The developers that build applications have a huge amount of influence on how they&#39;re deployed. We believe that developers using VirtualBox can help guide their friends in the data center towards xVM Server as the preferred deployment engine,&quot; he said.Sun may also look to align VirtualBox with its other developer-oriented assets, such as NetBeans and Glassfish, he said.&quot;Having a virtual lab story -- assuming it works and developers and QA like it -- is good for a developer-friendly company like Sun,&quot; said Michael Cot&#233;, an analyst with Redmonk. &quot;But I&#39;m not familiar with VirtualBox, so I don&#39;t know if it in particular is good or bad.&quot;Programmers who aren&#39;t using virtualization now ought to start, Cot&#233; said. &quot;You&#39;d have to be one of those self-flagellation types to not want virtual labs in your developer tool-chains,&quot; he said. &quot;Maintaining a bunch of physical machines is tedious. If I&#39;m a developer and I have to write software that runs on four different platforms, spread out over however many different versions of Windows, Linux distros, OS X, et cetera, all of those machines add up. And then creating &#39;fresh installs&#39; of them for testing gets worse.&quot;
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Key tools to unlock greater chip performance Sun Microsystems has announced new functionality for Solaris Express Developer Edition. The OpenSolaris-based distribution targets developers for the Solaris OS, Java, and Web 2.0 with a set of products that are optimized for multi-core processor architectures and includes new compilers and development tools designed to assist developers in creating better applications more rapidly.â¦
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Sun Microsystems to plunk down about $1 billion for one of the most successful open-source software companies.