I like these short news that we can found here and here about Solaris. Almost every day drives its own bag of new stuffs, do we really to need to prove OpenSolaris (and, by extension, Solaris) is gaining momentum in the market place ?

I recently spent a couple of days in London talking to a .Net customer about Java Enterprise Edition architecture and development.

It was really interesting to share views and experiences with these guys. I realized how much the architecture and the concepts are close to each other, altough our vocabulary differ.

One night, the customer convince us to take the tube (for US-only guys : the tube is the UK subway system) to enjoy a dinner downtown.
It’s difficult to travel in there without thinking about what recently hapened but people continue to live and work as before, even at night, the car was crowded. Security is impressive as well : armed police officers and (pre-attacks) video camera are everywhere.

This morning, I found out this very short but entertaining article (well, at least entertaining for the geeks we all are) on the little history of the DNS system. Guess who was first to register its domain name between Sun, Microsoft and Oracle ?

Beside financial analysts, people are rarely happy to learn that a company decides to reduce its work force. Even when this company is a competitor. I am thinking about all these people that are or will be soon fired, how they will announce that to their family, how they will live for the next months and how important it is for them to start a new carreer. All my sympathy is for them, and I hope some smart people will be able to find their way to Sun.

The most popular open-source and end-to-end web platform today is certainly LAMP, named after the first letter of the softwares used :

• Linux, the operating environment
• Apache, the web server
• MySQL, the database
• PHP, Perl or Phyton, the programing languages

The openess, the low price tag and the qualities of this platform made it very popular amongst open-source developers and ISPs.

Is Sun able to challenge this ? Let’s see our open-source software stack :

• Obviously, we have an operating environment : OpenSolaris
• we have an enterprise class application server : GlassFish
• we have web single sign-on technology : OpenSSO
• and we have the best development and deployment platforms : Java Standard Edition and Java Enterprise Edition

All, but the Java platforms, are open-sourced under the terms of the OSI approved CDDL license.

What are the missing pieces ?

• Most importantly, a database. For sure, Sun will not compete with the Oracle of this world anytime soon, but this interview indicates we might add an open-source database to our software portfolio
• An OSI approved open-source license for the Java platform is definitively something asked for by the community. My opinion is that Java is already built very openly : Mustang source code is available, everyone can submit a patch to correct or improve it and the bug database is fully open as well.
  We think that interoperability is of greater value for the Java community. We therefore enforce compatibility for all implementations, something we would not be able guarantee with a 100% open-source Java platform

This list is pretty short, isn’t it ? We indeed are soon in a position to offer a full open-source stack of softwares for web applications. With the additional benefit of being in a position to offer enterprise-level support and services to deploy it and integrate it in an existing IT infrastructure.

The end of LAMP ? I don’t think so, LAMP is vastly used, cheap and offer a excellent quality. But watch out the industry moves, maybe the next LAMP is JOGx (Java, OpenSolaris, Glasfish and … a database)

Sharing is good ! You will end up with more choice.

Is it still necessary to convince people about java momentum ? Should you answer “yes” to this question, here are some quick facts gathered during the JavaONE general sessions :

• 15000 persons gathered for the largest Java development event of the year
• 2.5 Billion devices are now running Java. We have more cell phone than PC running Java today
• This year, the Java developer community increased by about 12%, reaching 4.5 million developers.
• IBM renew its J2EE license for the next 11 years
• Every single blue-ray DVD player (whose specs has just been finalized) will have a Java runtime build in to propose interactive and connected experience to consumers
• Sun’s Java System Application Server is now open-sourced
• Sun’s Java System Enterprise Service Bus is now open-sourced
• Microsoft is hosting technical conferences this year, their topic will be about Java – .Net interroperability.
• and my prefered : Sun’s announced it’s intent to buy Seebeyond. What a move in the SOA space !

I am often proud to work for a company that somewhat influenced the IT industry as a whole (remember the first TCP/IP workstations, NFS, Java, …)
Today, we’ve probably reached a new milestone : Solaris is ditributed under the terms of an open source license and available for the community.
I am really looking forward the future : how much this move will impact the operating system industry ? What will become OpenSolaris in the next coming years.

Today, Sun started a major rebranding campaign. The new theme is articulated around a “s-shaped” design. “S” stands for sharing. Sharing is Sun’s philosophy since day one Sun’s objective is to increase brand recognition and highlight the company’s products and services. The S curve campaign produced some really nice ads collected in this gallery.

This announcement almost went unnoticed : since last week the Oasis consortium finalized the specification of the Open Document Format for Office Applications, aka OpenDocument

Office Applications like Microsoft Office, Open Office (and its commercial derivative StarOffice), iWork, KOffice will now have a common open standard as file format.

The Oasis-approved OpenDocument file format is a derivative of the OpenOffice 1.0 XML and ZIP based file format and is already available in pre-release versions of Open Office 2.0 and Star Office 8.0

Now it will be interesting to watch what the industry leader will propose in the next versions of its Office suite.