China--Sun Microsystems continues its tilt toward the open-source world.
The company"s president and chief operating officer, Jonathan Schwartz, said here Wednesday that Sun plans to give its proprietary Solaris server operating system an open-source flavor, but he declined to give a timetable for the shift. "I don"t want to say when that will happen," Schwartz said in a press conference in conjunction with the company"s SunNetwork conference. "But make no mistake: We will open-source Solaris."
The declaration is another indication of the company"s grudging acknowledgment of the rising popularity of open-source software such as Linux, which presents an opportunity for Sun to undercut rival software maker Microsoft but also poses a competitive threat to Sun itself. On the opportunity side, Sun this week released a second edition of its Java Desktop System, its version of Linux for desktop computers, which reproduces some features of Microsoft Windows.