Sun is about to take the next step in its plan to refurbish the reputation of its Solaris operating system in the eyes of a small but crucial group: programmers.
The company is expected to start sharing some source code of the Unix version and to detail its OpenSolaris plan on Tuesday, moves it hopes will help build an active programming community around the software.
Developers are a key link in a growth cycle that connects students, new projects, customer purchasing and software-partner support. And developers could help Sun amplify its effort to expand Solaris from its niche on computers using Sun's own Sparc processors to the vastly larger market of machines using x86 processors such as Intel's Pentium and AMD's Opteron.
Solaris remains a popular version of Unix, and its widespread use in the dot-com boom helped Sun fend off an assault by Microsoft's Windows. But Linux poses a different threat altogether. It's widely used among computing students who can take it apart and rebuild it to see how it works -- and those are the people who later turn into the system administrators who will be tapped to set up their employers' new server farm.
"Sun is clearly trying to recapture mind share with developers that in some cases are looking more toward Linux as a reference platform for new application development," said Meta Group analyst Brian Richardson.
Linux leader Linus Torvalds and others believe Sun has its work cut out for it. Take the example of Brian Gilman, president of Panther Informatics, which helps clients deal with computing systems for biotechnology tasks such as drug discovery.
"I just hired a cheap kid to do stuff for me. He's from MIT, so he's supposed to know everything. They're getting trained on Linux," Gilman said.
To see the magnitude of the challenge Sun faces, though, you don't have to look farther than Red Hat, the top Linux seller.
Its core Red Hat Enterprise Linux product is built with the help of countless outside programmers in a broad and deep open source community, and the company itself contributes to numerous open source programs. Yet Red Hat still is struggling to build its own programming community, called Fedora.
"If Red Hat is having trouble developing any kind of community around their distribution, what opportunity is Sun going have?" asked Illuminata analyst Gordon Haff.
But Sun President and chief agitator Jonathan Schwartz is unflagging in his efforts. And he makes it clear the fundamental motivation is Sun's bottom line through reaching new customers.
"To the extent we're positioning Sun to start growing new customers, all such opportunities start, at some point, through a conversation. Typically with a developer," Schwartz said in his blog this month.
Red Hat, for one, is sceptical. "It's hard getting people to follow the banner. They've got to prove that there's significant value there," said Greg Dekoenigsberg, Red Hat's community relations manager.
Sun has its own rebuttals to Red Hat. For one thing, Solaris x86 will be free to those who just want the software and security fixes, a contrast to Red Hat's current practice with its premium Linux version.
Sun's open source BSD roots
Open source operating systems aren't totally alien to Sun. Unix got its start at AT&T, but Sun co-founder Bill Joy was instrumental in an open source variant developed at the University of California at Berkeley. For half the company's history, Sun used this BSD version of Unix in a product called SunOS.
In the 1990s, Sun switched from SunOS to Solaris, which was based instead on the Unix software Sun licensed from AT&T.
One of the curiosities of the technology world is that the company that ended up with those AT&T Unix contracts is the SCO Group, which alleges in lawsuits against IBM and others that proprietary Unix technology was moved into Linux against the terms of those contracts.
So how is it Sun is permitted to open source Unix outright while IBM is sued for more than $5bn in damages? Sun is mum on particulars, but it has said it licensed additional rights in a 2003 deal in which it paid SCO $9.3m.
