Sun at 25: Where are the founders now?
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Sun Microsystems is still around. But what about the four men who gave it life? InfoWorld went on the hunt for Sun's founding fathers: Andy Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Scott McNealy. Here's what we found.
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Ziff Davis - The Public Patent Foundation and others have serious questions about what Sun's new open-source patent policies will actually mean for developers.
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Relatively calm weather was the standard forecast for the  Sun, which is near the end of another 11-year solar  cycle, but raging solar storms just spotted at its south pole now tell a  different story.    Video: Sun Storms
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The United States is losing its leadership role in particle physics as its best brains move to sunny Switzerland. But fear not: There's always another giant accelerator on the horizon. By John Borland.
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Sun Microsystems has become a "patron" of the Free Software Foundation, joining the likes of HP, IBM, Google and MySQL. The announcement was made over the weekend at the FOSDEM conference in Brussels, and follows Sun's decision to license Java under the GPL.
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&quot;We have one solar maximum left to learn what we need to know before we send humans back to the Moon.&quot; â-Prof. Robert Lin, Chairman of the Solar Sentinels Working Group, SPD, June 2006
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When last interviewed by SYS-CON Radio at LinuxWorld Conference &amp; Expo, Sun&#39;s John Fanelli - senior director of marketing for Sun&#39;s Network Systems Group - was adamant that the sheer number of product offerings Sun has delivered into the Linux community
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Sun has lost the case brought against it by Eastman Kodak. The photographic giant convinced a Federal jury that Sun infringed its patents in the development of the Java programming language.
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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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By Nicole C. Wong, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.  Feb. 23--Scott McNealy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 -- exactly 25 years ago from tomorrow.
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BRIC nation Sun Microsystems is looking to billions of citizens in Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC), defined by the west as emerging economies, for long-term success.â¦
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This is the question posed by Will Hurley of BMC.  After chatting with him today about life, the upcoming elections, and the open source community in general, I decided that I am pretty curious about how to answer that question myself. read more
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Life & style: Menswear shows: big-name companies struggle to stay in style without their founding fathers.
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Sun Microsystems Inc. SUNW.O is  staging its first press and customer event in New York on  Tuesday in three years to roll out new products and woo  customers in the banking industry, one of the network computer  maker's most important markets.
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[Technology India]: London, Oct 31 : Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who have reconstructed the sun&#39;s activity over the last 11 millennia, have forecasted decreased activity within a few decades.
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Roy Ganor, a committer on the Eclipse PDT project has written up a post from an insider's perspective on the whole thing and the path that led them to a stable 1.0 release.   Today the PDT project community consists of about 30 users that are daily involved, and about 300 users that are weekly involved, and about 13,000 users that are monthly involved in the project . Remarkable! by any mean of open-source project.   He talks about initial feelings about the move towards PHP, how the community grew surrounding the project and the level of integration that the project has with both the Eclipse software and with the Eclipse community.
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Almost 2-1/2 years have passed since the Moon plunged completely into the Earth's shadow. But if you live in Europe, Africa, or the eastern half of North America, but sure to put a big circle on your calendar for Saturday, March 3.