Solaris

Five years after Sun Microsystems began a bold effort to rejuvenate Solaris by attracting outside programming involvement, Oracle apparently is scrapping what remains of the OpenSolaris project.

Oracle acquired the Sun version of Unix in January, but has shown little of Sun's interest in building a vibrant external community of programmers around Solaris to match some of Linux's collaborative advantages. The OpenSolaris board has been left in limbo with no contact from the company for months. Even with no official communications, though, Oracle's inattention sent a strong indirect message that OpenSolaris wasn't on the company's … Read more

One of Sun Microsystems' ambitious dreams, a vibrant open-source community for the Solaris operating system to rival the Linux collective, is in serious danger of evaporating in the Oracle era.

Oracle is committed to Solaris, a version of Unix, but the future of the open-source OpenSolaris project is in limbo, and the OpenSolaris Governing Board that oversees the open-source community is threatening to disband.

Sun poured resources into the OpenSolaris project in an attempt to give it some of the new-era flavor and developer attention devoted to rival Linux. After Oracle's acquisition of Sun, though, the board is struggling … Read more

Between Apple's iPad (important but disappointing) and Oracle's explanation of how it will integrate Sun (goodbye, best of breed) this has been a big week in the technology landscape. And oddly enough, hardware, rather than software, is the area to pay attention to.

Now that Oracle has Sun hardware to sell, it took the wind out of the sails of many Sun value-added resellers who were effectively order takers. Oracle is notoriously good at wringing money out of customers in a way that makes it feel OK. It seems highly unlikely that customers will prefer to not buy … Read more

Despite all the hype associated with a never-ending Linux versus Windows battle, it's Unix, and specifically Sun Solaris that has felt the most pressure in the server operating system landscape.

While I doubt that Solaris will completely languish long-term under Oracle's watchful eye (in fact, it may well flourish), there is little question that Sun's ups and downs in the recent past have made customers look to alternatives.

At a recent IBM analyst meeting, Inna Kuznetsova, director, Linux strategy, told attendees that the Linux business is strong and growing.

For those wondering whether Oracle or Red Hat is weathering the recession best, this week may have settled the question. On Tuesday the market cheered Oracle for only seeing a 5.2 percent drop in revenue, with a 7.2 percent drop in profit (absent the strong dollar, Oracle would have seen a 4 percent increase in revenue and a 5 percent increase in profit).

Red Hat? Well, on Wednesday Red Hat announced fiscal first-quarter revenue of $174 million, up 11 percent from the prior year. Subscription revenue was up 14 percent year over year to $148.8 million. The … Read more

Sun is set to launch the latest version of OpenSolaris, tuning it for the enterprise with a new support contract, processor support, and networking and storage technology.

Sun, which is in the process of being acquired by Oracle, is expected to introduce OpenSolaris 2009.06 on Monday at the CommunityOne developer conference in San Francisco. OpenSolaris is the open-source version of Solaris, and previously it has been aimed mainly at developers and as a platform for testing features that will later make their way into Solaris itself.

The new version, however, will be offered with an enterprise-grade support contract that … Read more

Katherine Egbert has predicted (again) that Red Hat will be bought, this time by IBM. While I have indulged my own Red Hat acquisition fantasies in the past, I just can't see a near-term acquisition of Red Hat by IBM.

Unless....

Unless, as Egbert predicts, Oracle will throw its weight fully behind Sun's Solaris, to the detriment of its Linux business:

It seems inevitable Oracle will favor Solaris. While Oracle has said publicly they will continue support of RHEL, there is a sense within Red Hat that an increased focus on Open Solaris over RHEL is inevitable, as … Read more

Update at 7:25 a.m. PDT: Updated stock information added and headline updated.

Sun Microsystems shares soared more than 10 percent in premarket trading on Thursday, following a Bloomberg report that the struggling hardware maker was interested in resuming merger talks with IBM.

Sun climbed nearly 10.8 percent to $6.79 a share in premarket trading. But as the markets opened for regular trading, Sun's shares settled back to a more modest uptick of 2.77 percent to $6.30 a share. The broader markets were mixed.

Either way, its stock remains a ways off from the $… Read more

Sun Microsystems has adopted an ambitious business model that depends upon commodity open-source downloads serving as loss leaders and gateways for hardware and services revenue. According to a report in The Register, however, profits have been hard to come by for Sun, which may have been what scuttled its merger with IBM.

Using Red Hat as a foil, The Register suggests that the way forward for Sun, which has seen its proprietary businesses commoditized, may be to commoditize itself further:

The open source distribution model cannot generate the kind of profits that Sun's shareholders became accustomed to in the … Read more