Even as Sun took its first step to make its Solaris operating system open source software, the company said it's considering a similar move with its server software product.
Sun is considering making its Java Enterprise System server software open source, John Loiacono, Sun's executive vice-president of software, said in a conference call with reporters on Tuesday. "It's something we're looking at closely right now. It's absolutely in our interest to go pursue that."
As expected, Sun launched its OpenSolaris.org Web site on Tuesday, released its Dynamic Tracing component of the upcoming Solaris 10 as open source software, and announced that more than 1,600 patents will be available for unfettered use -- a leapfrog over IBM, which two weeks ago offered the use of 500 patents to open source programmers.
"Sun is hoping to regain that position and image and reputation as being the biggest friend of community development and open source," chief executive Scott McNealy said. "With respect to Solaris and OpenSolaris, we've done everything that was expected and even more."
Sun's open source Solaris move is widely seen as a response to competitive pressure from Linux. For server software, IBM, Microsoft, BEA and others provide plenty of competitors for Sun's JES, which is used for tasks such as hosting Web pages, managing email, tracking passwords and running Java business software.
Sun already has made aggressive moves to lure customers that have preferred those rivals' products. Most notable is the per-employee pricing under which Sun lets a customer use as much of the software as desired as long as it pays Sun $100 per year for each employee in the organisation. The pricing can mean big savings over competing products.
Making JES open source software "certainly would make sense given the way they've been going," said Summit Strategies analyst Dwight Davis. "They've been increasingly lowering the cost, to the point of free in some instances, and offering compelling licensing terms."
So far, Sun's moves haven't damaged rivals' dominance, but Sun is responding. Sun president Jonathan Schwartz said earlier this month that the company is looking at selling the JES software for departments or other employee subsets, not just for entire companies.
The departmental pricing "does address one of the major problems with the corporation-wide employee-based model", Davis said. "If you have 20,000 employees and 100 users, it doesn't make sense. But if all 100 are in the finance department, under the new scheme, so much the better."
Don't expect an open source JES anytime soon. Loiacono said Sun doesn't want to overwhelm open source programmers.
