Sun open-sources digital archiving
Sun Microsystems continues to run amok in the open-source world, open-sourcing software in every direction. Today, it is in the direction of digital-archiving software, which has been used to capture and maintain "business images, records, consumer- and corporate-created digital content, e-science work, and high-performance computing (HPC) data for hundreds of years."
How does Sun expect to make money? In this case, it's the hardware, which makes a lot of sense:
Sun StorageTek 5800 Open Edition can be downloaded for free, allowing developers to experience the simplicity of storing and retrieving fixed content data and metadata efficiently. The purchase of the StorageTek 5800 System provides greater enhanced RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) and includes extreme data protection against data corruption and data loss.
The idea is to get the software for free, and install it where you wish. But if you want an added level of security and reliability (and frankly, if you care enough about the archives to want to guarantee their availability for 100 years, why wouldn't you?), you purchase the hardware to go with it. Try out the software for free; buy the hardware when you're ready for production.
Makes sense to me.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
While kudos to Sun for this move, it is important to remember that bits is only part of archiving. Consider presentation as important; the file format and the ability to recreate the specifics of the format are equally important. That's why there are ISO standards like PDF/A ISO 19005-1.
Archiving is a vastly overloaded term. There are already folks suffering from lack of archival capability in the bits, there are equal lack in the ability to reproduce the intent. In Arching, context is still king. After all, what good does seeing 11010100111001101 do you? Even if you know it's in an LSE format?
So it's part of the puzzle. But not the full solution for archiving.
davemc