It's being reported by C|net that Sun plans on announcing the release of Solaris as open source software on June 14th. The strategy appears to be an effort to fend off Red Hat, IBM, and Microsoft by engaging developers to take a look under the hood to see what makes it tick. The author says, "Sun plans to publish extensive documentation to let programmers build the operating system from scratch and understand its inner workings." It appears that Sun has been working hard to make sure that Solaris can be built using GCC but will also allow the free use of it's own compiler.

According to the opensolaris.org site, Solaris will be realeased under the OSI-approved Common Development and Dsistribution License (CDDL). The release is expected to include over 1600 patents and millions of development hours worth of code. This being Sun's contribution to the open source community.

I for one look forward to seeing what they have to offer. They seem to have a decent grip on making Solaris run fine on multi-processor systems, something Linux has had mixed results with. I'm sure all the techno-pundits will be beaking off over the next few days and if I get a chance I hope to be able to tune in. Being in the middle of a huge move makes that a somewhat remote possibility though.

Anyhow..., I find this a significant move on Sun's part and one worth keeping an eye on.

Check back regularly, no telling what little nugget of gnarled knowledge or whimsical wisdom you're going to unearth here but it could be a 'Sun nugget', and it just might shine real bright.

Hasta La L8r Señor Sun Tanner