Sun, the company behind the world's most succesfull Unix based on the berkely unix, has made some interesting moves the last couple of years. One of the most remarkable one was the opening of the source code to their operating system (Solaris, formerly known as SUN OS) and making it available to the public. It's called OpenSolaris now.


Latest news around SUN is the opening of their cluster code, making the cluster technology available to the public.

Sun is not open sourcing all of the technology in one swoop but is spreading out the contribution over an 18-month period that will comprise three distinct stages. The first phase includes the application agent modules that enable applications to plug into the high availability environment.(Enterprise It Planet)

In our current times where Linux is rising as an operating system this is a good and solid strategy, as SUN will be able to tie customers to them, not because the operating system is now GPL, but because of proven technology that is now available much cheaper than before. After some difficult years, we can see a steady rise, and I would not be surprised to see SUN at the top once more. Don't forget where they come from ("We are the dot in dot net", remember ??)