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A Sun-ny open-source and Linux face
May 19, 2006

It was an interesting week out in San Francisco at Sun and friends' JavaOne conference.

After flirting with the idea of open-sourcing Java for ages, Sun has finally agreed that it will open-source Java... someday, real-soon-now.

I'm not going to be holding my breath.

In the meantime, though, Sun did make Java more GPL-friendly, with its new Distribution License for Java.

Prior to the show, Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz admitted, "Historically the Linux distributions and Java have always been a little bit oil and water, and there is an emulsifier now so we can collaborate in a much more interesting way."

Schwartz also announced that the company was going to get buddy-buddy with Ubuntu Linux. In fact, Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's angel investor and head of its commercial branch, Canonical Ltd., was at the show to share the love.

Schwartz said that Ubuntu was "bringing the best of free software to the desktop." Shuttleworth returned the compliment by announcing that Canonical/Ubuntu will be introducing a server product on June 1 that will support Sun's new UltraSPARC T1 chip, aka Niagara.

In an eWEEK interview by Peter Galli prior to the show, Schwartz revealed that Sun and Ubuntu had been working together for some time. Ubuntu running on Niagara is "an utterly profound change in Sun's system strategy. We have been working on this for some nine months, and have seen tremendous adoption in the community to help make this happen."

Sun is also working closer now with Debian. In the past, Sun has had a rocky partnership with Red Hat, but it's never had a partnership with a community Linux distribution before.

How will it all work out? Well, Sun has had an up and down relationship with open-source and Linux over the years. Still, Sun could certainly use some open-source and Linux support for its business, so perhaps this is the time that Sun will do well with the open-source community and its Linux rivals and partners.


-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols



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