Sun boots workstation roots in favor of JAVA ticker
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So long SUNW In a rather odd marketing ploy, Sun Microsystems will change its ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA.â¦
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Novell's SuSE software is set to join Red Hat as a server option. Also: Is AMD in Dell's future?
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(InfoWorld) - In a world where Web-based applications have dominated the discourse lately, does the desktop still matter? Presenters at the appropriately named Desktop Matters conference in San Jose, Calif. on Thursday afternoon argued that it does. Billed as "The Conference for Java Desktop Application Developers," the event focuses mostly on Java technologies like Swing, which provides component technology for building Java desktop applications. The Spring Java Web framework and the NetBeans open-source platform for Java also are noted on the agenda. But the opening keynote pitted desktop technologies including Swing against AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the popular technique for building Web applications. Speakers included Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, who are cofounders of ajaxian.com and producers of the Desktop Matters conference. They said desktop applications and Web applications are actually becoming more alike. "Weâre kind of seeing the Web become more desktoppy and the desktop become more Webby," Almaer said. Swing and AJAX are moving closer in such aspects as available effects and components support, the speakers argued. Also, hosted versions of desktop applications, such as Microsoft Office systems, are starting to appear. Meanwhile, AJAX applications are "cloning" desktop applications like Zoho Office, Galbraith said. The speakers and audience members cited what they believe are numerous areas where desktop applications enjoy an advantage over Web applications: access to local storage, graphics performance, memory consumption, and the ability to keep sensitive data local. "We've got a few customers out there who are used to having a desktop app," one audience member said. These customers will wonder what is going on if they are required to install a browser as part of an application upgrade, he said. Presenters also said desktop Java is fast while AJAX is slow. But they noted better offline support is planned for AJAX via the Dojo Offline Toolkit. Also at the event, Galbraith announced a project called Nimbus, which is intended to provide a more attractive look and feel for Swing applications. Developed by Sun, Nimbus is an open-source project hosted on Java.net. Graphically, Nimbus resembles Mac OS X and the Windows Vista Aero interface technology, said Galbraith. "In general, it's just a much nicer look and feel," than has been available for Swing before, he said. Nimbus offers features like variable widget sizes for better use of screen space and nested split panes on the user interface. A 1.0 beta release of Nimbus is planned for the JavaOne conference, being held in San Francisco beginning May 8. Nimbus may be included in the planned Java 7 release with Java 5 to provide baseline accommodations. Another topic to be discussed at the Desktop Matters conference is SwingX, which provides open-source extensions to Swing, such as components and frameworks intended to make Swing easier to use, Galbraith said.
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If you had any doubts about Sun Microsystems? commitment to open source, it?s time to set them aside. Sun put its money where its mouth is Wednesday, with the announcement that it would buy open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping $1 billion. If the price tag set tongues wagging, however, it was no more tantalizing than the question that immediately sprung to the minds of IT managers everywhere: Now that Sun owns MySQL, what on earth does it plan to do with it?Sun has toyed with the idea of a database offering of its own for at least two years. But in a market where basic relational database functionality is increasingly considered a commodity, competing successfully is no mean feat, even when playing the open source card.Certainly, Sun isn?t the first to try it. In 2001, leading Linux vendor Red Hat launched its own branded version of the open source PostgreSQL database, only to scrap the project a year later after deciding that servicing and supporting a database was not its core competency. Similarly, Computer Associates opened the source of the Ingres database in hopes of becoming a one-stop shop for customers in need of an enterprise application stack, but had little luck winning market share away from the likes of IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle. CA spun Ingres off into its own company in 2005, where it continues to nurture a small installed base.In his blog announcing the MySQL acquisition Wednesday, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz remains characteristically effusive. ?Until now, no platform vendor has assembled all the core elements of a completely open source operating system for the Internet,? he wrote. ?No company has been able to deliver a comprehensive alternative to the leading proprietary OS.?Yet CA?s and Red Hat?s experiences seem to discredit the idea that a stem-to-stern platform offering from a single vendor is what customers really want. Not to mention the fact that Sun already offers enterprise support for PostgreSQL, a competing open source database that is widely perceived as being technologically superior to MySQL. Schwartz reaffirmed Sun?s commitment to PostgreSQL in a conference call Wednesday, causing some analysts to speculate whether the MySQL acquisition was anything more than a billion-dollar PR stunt.But there may be method to Sun?s madness. The considerable goodwill that MySQL has cultivated among enterprise customers could have benefits for Sun that technology alone never could.?I think the answer is simple: ubiquity,? says Andy Astor, CEO of EnterpriseDB, which markets a high-performance, commercial database product based on PostgreSQL. ?[Sun is] a big company; to move their needle, they need to see millions of potential users, which MySQL provides.?According to MySQL?s own estimates, there are already some 11 million active installations of the MySQL database worldwide. What?s more, MySQL is virtually the de facto standard relational database for rapid application development, particularly for the Web. In future, as these fledgling sites mature and their needs broaden, they will become natural customers for Sun?s enterprise support offerings.Sun?s new role as steward of MySQL is sure to ruffle feathers in the software industry, as well -- particularly at Oracle, which, with its recent acquisitions, increasingly competes with Sun in the enterprise application platform arena. In 2005, Oracle bought Innobase, makers of a plug-in component that adds advanced features to MySQL, in what was widely perceived as a competitive swipe at the open source upstart.For his part, MySQL CEO M?rten Mickos has repeatedly denied that his company?s aim is to displace high-end databases such as Oracle?s. And that?s only appropriate; for those customers who demand Oracle?s most advanced features, no other product will do. But Mickos? protestations verge on false modesty. On the low end, MySQL is an absolute pandemic, and it?s already making headway into the mid-tier territory traditionally owned by the likes of Microsoft. That trend is only likely to accelerate with Sun?s backing.What is unclear, however, is whether Sun will take any steps to alter MySQL?s license terms. Licensing and project governance have played key roles in MySQL?s success, and as a result, MySQL?s license policy is somewhat more restrictive than the one that Sun has used for the rest of its software portfolio.Although all MySQL code is available under the GNU GPL (General Public License), the product is developed primarily by full-time employees of MySQL. Furthermore, the MySQL company requests that community developers sign over copyright to their code contributions to the company before those changes become part of the main MySQL code base. This allows the company to offer a separate, commercial version of its database for enterprise customers who don?t want to be bound by the terms of the GPL. Initially, this license structure was used mainly to allow companies to embed the MySQL database into their own products, but the MySQL company was criticized last year for making it more difficult for non-paying customers to download the enterprise version of the database.By comparison, Sun has been freer with its own code, foregoing separate, commercial versions of its products in favor of a subscription-based enterprise support scheme. PostgreSQL is arguably even more free; it is governed in a much more distributed, community-based fashion than MySQL, and its permissive license even allows proprietary derivatives, such as EnterpriseDB.Ironically, however, MySQL?s stringent intellectual property policy may be precisely what makes it so appealing to Sun. Red Hat Database and Sun?s own version of PostgreSQL were merely different retoolings of an existing open source software product, one that customers could just as easily download from elsewhere. To the enterprise IT community at large, however, there?s really only one MySQL -- and from now on, that name will be indelibly associated with Sun. Remember, for all Sun?s talk about open source, this is a company that banks so heavily on its trademarks that it had its stock ticker symbol changed to JAVA.Ah, but there?s the rub. Sun open-sourced the Java platform in 2006, and while the move has been widely hailed by developers, not everyone in the business community was as thrilled with the idea of Sun giving away its crown jewels. As former Sun vice president Larry Singer put it, ?We [at Sun] were spending all of our time and attention ? on things that were important from an intellectual standpoint, important from an innovative standpoint, [but it was] hard to understand how they were going to drive revenue for the company.?So far, MySQL has built a solid business selling open source database software. Whether Sun has the strategic acumen to take that success to the next level, however, remains to be seen. But stay tuned; after all, $1 billion gives Sun a hell of an incentive.
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TechWeb - Sun's recent decision to open-source some elements of Java is pretty exciting -- but a few years overdue, says &lt;i&gt;InformationWeek&lt;/i&gt; columnist Eric A. Hall
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InfoWorld - Sun Microsystems has added Ruby support to the NetBeans IDE and bolstered the JRuby platform as well, company officials acknowledged on Thursday.
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Sun is working on technology to make it easier to run different languages on the Java Virtual Machine.
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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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Sun's BrandZ technology, which lets Linux applications run on a virtual slice of a Solaris x86 installation, is finally ready for prime time.
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Ziff Davis - Sun Microsystems is rolling out its newest Java Enterprise System release, along with five market-driven subsets aimed at solving specific business problems.
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I believe you have my stapler Sun Microsystems has gone very granola by buying desktop virtualization software player innotek. (The small 'i' stands for big innovation or something like that.)â¦
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Tiny, sensor-driven devices exposed A brainchild of Sun Microsystems' research wing, the Small Programmable Object Technology (Sun SPOT) platform code is now open to Java developers at large.â¦
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InfoWorld - Continuing its steady push to win over the hearts and wallets of midsize companies, IBM on Tuesday is rolling out two lower-priced Unix-based servers that will go head-to-head with offerings from archrivals Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.
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IBM (NYSE: IBM), Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: SUNW) and other technology companies recently "donated" portions of their software to the open-source community. But those donations are not motivated by corporate generosity; there are tactics and strategies behind these moves.
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Refreshing its development tools arsenal, Sun Microsystems on Tuesday revealed plans for upcoming versions of Java Studio Creator and is unleashing upgrades to the NetBeans open source platform and Java Studio Enterprise.
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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 ??? 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 - In an eWEEK interview, the Sun exec says he sees Solaris, Linux, Java and even Windows coexisting.