Sun Joins Free Software Foundation
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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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Former rivals Sun Microsystems and Microsoft have been working together to make their products more compatible -- permitting Windows to run on Sun&#39;s hardware and making StarOffice and Java Runtime Environment compatible with XP SP2.
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It's not every day that the entire technical press goes bonkers over news in the open source world, but that's what happened last week, when Sun announced that it was buying MySQL.  Doubtless, the pleasant roundness of the sum involved - $1 billion â helped, as did the fact that most of that was cash.  But leaving aside the sense of satisfaction that events in the free software world should be suddenly thrust centre-stage, Sun's move does raise a larger question about the fate of all open source start-ups. read more
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Ziff Davis - With a relatively hostile environment that has pitted proprietary software against open source as a backdrop, the Free Software Foundation, the steward of the GNU General Public License, is working on the first revamp to the license in 13 years.
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Sun said Thursday that it had released Java Enterprise System 5.0, a set of subscription-based services that complement enterprise operating systems like the company's own Solaris 10.
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Analysis: Sun broadens its open source stake, while MySQL enjoys Sun's standing and budget.
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Sun Microsystems has decided to offer support for the OpenOffice.org suite, charging $20 per user per year to companies that distribute the open-source software.
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Open Solutions Alliance hopes to make open-source software programs work better together.
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Sun Microsystems plans to unveil the latest version of its flagship Solaris operating system and offer a free version of the program to make it more attractive to corporate and academic computer users.
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Sun's 'Project Indiana' will revamp Solaris to lure open-source developers.
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(InfoWorld) - The Eclipse Foundation has established itself as a premier open source software tools project. The organization has gained support from vendors ranging from IBM (which helped found Eclipse in 2001) to Borland Software, BEA Systems, and seemingly every other major player in the software industry except Sun Microsystems and Microsoft. The EclipseWorld 2006 show in Cambridge, Mass. last week afforded those using Eclipse technologies a chance to get updated on the latest developments at Eclipse. InfoWorld Editor-at-Large Paul Krill attended and interviewed Mike Milinkovich, Eclipse executive director, about the state of Eclipse and subjects ranging from dynamic languages to rivalries with Sun and Microsoft. Â  InfoWorld: Where is Eclipse headed and what new technologies are on the horizon? Mike Milinkovich: Thatâs a open-ended question. When I look at the broad initiatives that are going on within Eclipse, a couple of things come to mind. First is continued growth and adoption around our Rich Client Platform, and thatâs something that we expect to see continued emphasis on. Weâre seeing more projects joining Eclipse around extending RCP in various areas, so thatâs good news for RCP. And as we talked about in our press release earlier this week, weâre very pleasantly surprised about the growing adoption and awareness of RCP. A couple of other things in just sort of broad terms [include] more support for multiple languages. Eclipse has always been focused on being a platform for the development of language environments, and weâre seeing some really interesting new developments, some of them within Eclipse and some of them in commercial products. In the commercial products space, Adobe is in the process of building and releasing its Flex Builder 2.0, which is an Eclipse-based development environment for ActionScript, which is their language for the Flex servers. And within Eclipse, in the next quarter weâre planning on having the first release from the PHP IDE project, which we think is really exciting. PHP [Hypertext Preprocessor] is a really important language both for enterprise development but [also for] Web development in general, and having Eclipse tooling available for PHP is something that weâre pretty excited about. IW: That leads right into my next question. Do you see more support for dynamic programming languages? You have PHP, you have the AJAX projects. Do you see more for some of the other languages that are out there? Ruby, Perl, Python? MM: Well, yes. Within the Eclipse ecosystem you can find Eclipse plug-ins and tooling for virtually every single dynamic language you can think of. Thereâs Eclipse tools for Ruby, RadRails is a project... These are not projects at Eclipse, but theyâre open source projects which are based on Eclipseâ¦ RadRails is an open source project based on Eclipse for building an IDE for Rails, which is the Ruby framework. And you have PyDev for Python, which is a fairly popular. This is another example of a plug-in, which is available from an open source project outside of Eclipse but is based on Eclipseâ¦. For virtually every dynamic language you can imagine, you can find Eclipse plug-ins to help enable development for it. And that really resonates back with what we were talking about previously about Eclipse being a platform for building development tools. Thatâs really the fundamental mission of the Eclipse platform. So within Eclipse, as I mentioned, we have the PHP tools. We also have the AJAX Toolkit Framework, and so this provides sort of added compiled debug for JavaScripts running inside the browser, so it provides an AJAX developer a very nice development environment for use with Firefox in building AJAX applications. And thereâs quite a few different AJAX frameworks out there, and it supports Dojo, Open-Rico and Zimbra currently, and I think theyâre definitely planning on adding more in the futureâ¦ And again, lastly I would mention the Rich AJAX Platform, which is a new project just getting started at Eclipse for providing an AJAX runtime thatâs based on the Eclipse component model for developers who want to use that style of development for building AJAX applications. IW: Which leads to my next question: Do you think thereâs kind of an overlap in some Eclipse projects? You have the Eclipse Rich AJAX Platform, thereâs also an AJAX Toolkit Framework. I know for the time being you have data tools in the Web tools Platform Project, you also have a separate Data Tools Platform Project. Do you think thereâs a lot of overlap going on or is it just based on which vendor proposes which project without too much thought given to consolidation? MW: Itâs a little bit of both. So within Eclipse as an open source community, we are willing to tolerate some overlap; let the projects work things out over time. And so far thatâs actually worked out pretty successfully. In the particular examples that you just raised, I donât see overlap. The AJAX Toolkit Framework and the Rich AJAX Platform, they donât overlap. Theyâre two very different things. The first one, ATF, is focused on the needs of developers looking for tools for building AJAX applications. And the second one, RAP, is a runtime environment, a runtime framework, for building AJAX applications. And on the other example, with Web tools and data tools projects, initially there was some overlap, but thatâs actually probably almost a poster child for project cooperation at Eclipse, because as data tools came to be and started to work, the Web tools guys moved their data connection layer and adopted the technology coming from data tools. IW: Is Eclipse de-emphasizing Java and refocusing on some of the other languages that we talked about? Is it focusing on some of the scripting languages as well as on .Net while de-emphasizing Java? MM: I wouldnât say weâre de-emphasizing Java. As Eclipse is growing and thereâs more projects joining the fold, there are more resources to take on more languages and more platforms. Now, almost every Eclipse project writes its code in Java. Weâre clearly heavy users of Java. But in terms of Java being the only platform or language that we support within Eclipse, thatâs never been the vision for Eclipse. Itâs always been about supporting as many languages and as many platforms as we can find people willing to work on projects for. IW: There's been some talk in the industry that Java is kind of yesterdayâs technology. Sun wouldnât like to hear that, but do you see it that way at all? MM: I kind of frankly take that stuff with a grain of salt. You know, thereâs this constant hype machine within the high-tech industry that the next shiny new thing is going to be the grand vision thatâs going to do everything that has never been done before. What my observation is, is that Java is now getting to the point where itâs clearly mature enough and stable enough to meet the needs of mainstream enterprise development and I think thatâs a good thing. Maturity isnât something to be ashamed of. Itâs something that the people that are talking about the shiny new things should treat with respect. IW: I guess thereâs kind of a trend toward putting the virtual machine on other languages. MM: Yes, and I think thatâs a great idea. Well, I think what youâre saying is thereâs a trend toward opening up the JVMs (Java Virtual Machines) to make it easier to support other languages. And I think thatâs a great idea. IW: Why? MM: Because the programmers want more than one language, but thereâs so much work and talent thatâs been invested in the runtime infrastructure thatâs part of the Java platform, that reinventing all of that technology for another language doesnât make any sense. You want to have a particular problem, which can be expressed more easily in a language other than Java, thatâs great. But you donât want to throw the baby out with the bath water. I mean you still want to be able to use this highly-tuned and mature runtime platform from companies like BEA and IBM and JBoss and Oracle that have spent years perfecting this middleware infrastructure for Web applications. You donât want to throw that out just because you want [to] program in another language. IW: How much money would you estimate is being generated by Eclipse-based software or is it still the main attraction to Eclipse is itâs all free? MM: I wish we actually had good numbers on trying to estimate the size of the Eclipse ecosystem. Iâm quite confident that itâs in the billion-dollar range and probably more, but we just donât have the hard numbers in terms of sizing that market. Unfortunately we havenât been able to get an analyst to actually spend the time to quantify those numbers. But what you said about the attraction to Eclipse being free, the economics of the Eclipse model is a little bit different than that, because the Eclipse community as a whole is almost uniquely focused on enabling a commercially profitable ecosystem or market around the free platform. So yes, we do provide open source tools and frameworks from Eclipse and those are provided for free. But we definitely are motivated across the Eclipse ecosystem to see people and companies make money from the Eclipse platform. IW: Whatâs going on with Eclipse as far as application lifecycle management? Some of thatâs on the agenda here, but could you maybe give a synopsis of whatâs going on there? MM: Sure. Thereâs several different projects going on at Eclipse in the area. Serena is leading a project called ALF, Application Lifecycle Framework, and Compuware is leading a project called Corona. And these are both projects that are in fairly early days, theyâre both in incubation. But application lifecycle management is an area where we see definite growth at Eclipse, but itâs going to take some time for these projects to mature and really hit their stride. IW: Whatâs the difference between Corona and ALF? MM: ALF is really focused on providing the technology for choreographing tools across multiple developers, and Corona is more focused on making it easier to integrate tools within a single workbench environment or within a single desktop environment. [There are subtle differences], but there actually are important differences for developers. IW: Like what? MM: You ask this every time we talk. [I am] just trying to think of a way to make it really simple to explain. I mean think if it as ALF is focused on choreographing tool integration across a whole team. Corona is more focused on making it easier for one developer in his particular environment to do his job. IW: This next question is about something you mentioned -- I guess it must have been last year -- at a conference in San Francisco. You talked about how you donât really need salespeople anymore. And I just met with a company (Genuitec) thatâs basing its technology on Eclipse and they donât have any salespeople. Do you see that as a trend where software companies, particularly open source software companies, donât have salespeople because they donât see the need? Do you see anything happening there? MM: I think that over time things are changing. What youâre really talking about is what is the channel by which people acquire software? Thereâs multiple ways you can acquire software. You can download it and use it, whether itâs for free or for purchase. You can buy it packaged or you can deal with a direct sales force and deal with people. Historically, enterprise software has been sold through the direct sales force channel, and I do believe over time, weâre starting to see success in open source software products in areas that have been traditionally the realm of the direct sales force. Iâm thinking of things like SugarCRM and Compiere and open source products like this. And those environments or those products have very, very low cost of sales, so as customers get more used to that, to being successful with that kind of software acquisition, I think that over time, yes, thereâs going to be fewer and fewer software salesmen. IW: Hereâs the standard question that I kind of usually ask last. Is anything going on as far as Sun joining Eclipse or merging NetBeans and Eclipse? MM: Nope, absolutely not. IW: No talks in the last year, two years? MM: I bump into (Sun executive) Simon Phipps at conferences and have a drink with him once in a whileâ¦. IW: There was one Java project that I guess Sun was working on with Eclipse. MM: There was a Sun committer working on -- it was actually on the base Eclipse platform to enable it for Solaris x86, as I recall correctly. So it was getting Eclipse running on one of their operating system platforms. IW: But thereâs no further movement since then? MW: No. And [in the] conversations Iâve had with Sun, theyâve made it pretty clear that theyâre not really interested in doing anything other than continuing to push their NetBeans strategy. IW: What do you think of their being two kind of rival camps? Is it good for competition? MM: Well, weâre certainly not shy of competition, and frankly weâre winning. IW: They seem to say differently. MM: Oh, good for them. I got the numbers, they donât. IW: Who do you see as your main rival, NetBeans or Windows .Net? MM: We clearly and have always felt that Eclipse is about enabling competition with Microsoft. IW: How have you fared there? MM: Actually, we started five years ago and I would say that starting from zero, the growth of Eclipse over the past five years has been absolutely phenomenal. Itâs been wonderful to see the development community embrace Eclipse the way it has over the last five years. IW: Is there anything else you wanted to mention? MM: Actually I just want to probably just close with reinforcing about RCP. To date, Eclipse has always been very much focused on tooling and being a tools platform, but what weâre I think really seeing now is RCP, Rich Client Platform, becoming a very important runtime infrastructure for application developers and ISVs who want to build multi-platform applications running on the desktop. And I think thatâs a very important niche for Eclipse and something that we expect to see continuing to grow.SEE ALSO:Eclipse chief talks up projects, awaits Sun and Microsoft
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Microsoft is launching free software to make it easier for developers to create software compatible with Windows Server 2008.
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InfoWorld - Sun Microsystems&#160;on Wednesday will begin donating its Solaris clustering code to the open-source community, the latest move in the company&#39;s&#160;ongoing strategy&#160;to eventually make all of its software freely available.
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Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW), as expected, has released the source code for its flagship Solaris 10 server operating system and also has moved the company's DTrace technology into the open source realm, along with a number of technology patents.
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Company's third open-source contribution is the first time it has shared code for actual application.
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California-based Sun Microsystems Inc. released its Unix-based operating system Solaris 10 for free Monday, Web Host Industry Review Magazine reports.
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Anyone who registers with Sun will be able to use Solaris for free on servers with x86 processors.