Free Republic

The Curious Incident of Sun in the Night-Time ~ by Richard Stallman Our community has been abuzz with the rumor that Sun has made its implementation Java free software (or "open source"). Community leaders even publicly thanked Sun for its contribution. What is Sun's new contribution to the FLOSS community? Nothing. Absolutely nothing--and that's what makes the response to this non-incident so curious. Sun's Java implementation remains proprietary software, just as before. It doesn't come close to meeting the criteria for free software, or the similar but slightly looser criteria for open source. Its source code is available only under...

Sun Microsystems plans to release on Tuesday the underlying design of its UltraSparc T1 "Niagara" processor under the terms of the General Public License. The move fulfills a commitment to employ the widely used open-source license that Sun President Jonathan Schwartz made at the Open Source Business Conference in January. David Yen, executive vice president of Sun's Sparc server group, is expected to discuss the move at the MultiCore Expo, which runs Tuesday through Thursday in Santa Clara, Calif., where Sun also has its headquarters. Sun's UltraSparc T1 has eight processing engines, called cores, each able to run four simultaneous...

MENLO PARK, Calif. (AP) - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger campaigned in Silicon Valley for several "year of reform" ballot initiatives Wednesday, comparing his quest for change in state government to the technological advances that the region's famed computer companies have brought to consumers. At a "town hall"-style campaign gathering at Sun Microsystems, Schwarzenegger urged the audience to support four ballot measures aimed at curbing the power of the Democrat-controlled Legislature and their allied public employee unions. He is pushing Proposition 74, which would extend, from two to five years, the time teachers must work to receive tenure; Proposition 75, which would...

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- On more than one occasion, Sun Microsystems' Chief Executive Officer Scott McNealy has publicly said the company he co-founded in 1982 has been for sale since Day 1. And according to a published report, McNealy could be close to setting the right price that would take Sun private in a leveraged buyout.BusinessWeek reported Friday that McNealy has had discussions with Silver Lake Partners about taking Sun (SUNW: news, chart, profile) private in a deal that values Sun at $5 to $5.50 a share, or between $16.9 billion and $18.6 billion, based on Sun's current number of...

Sun Microsystems is placing Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chip at the center of its low-end server strategy, starting with a dual-processor system, to be announced next month, and four- and eight-processor systems coming later. Sun plans to announce the dual-Opteron machine, called the v20z and with a starting price of less than $3,000, at its first quarterly news event of 2004, planned for Feb. 10 in San Francisco, sources familiar with the plan said. The announcement is expected to share the stage with details about how Sun's high-end products are being updated with the company's new UltraSparc IV processor....

31 July 2003 Scott McNealy, the chairman, president and CEO of systems vendor Sun Microsystems, has dramatically warned companies of the legal dangers of using open source software such as the Linux operating system. Following on from SCO Group's threats to sue Linux users over its intellectual property claims, McNealy told an audience of UK businesses that they should steer clear of open source software unless their suppliers can offer insurance against such legal action. "Don't touch open source software unless you have a team of intellectual property lawyers prepared to scour every single piece [of the open source code]....

What do you get when you cross Sun Microsystems and the open source community centered on Linux? I thought the answer was lower-cost servers that run Linux, which is what Sun announced this week. But Sun CEO Scott McNealy has far grander ambitions that he hopes the open source community will help him achieve: breaking Microsoft's grip on the desktop and expanding Sun's hardware offerings. I don't think anyone can break Microsoft's desktop grip at this point, but Sun has the right idea in formulating an alternative that is more coherent than the pieces you can cobble together to create...