ACADEMIA

Sun Microsystems today announced that it has distributed more than three million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) since the software became available on January 31. Customers and partners continue to download the Solaris 10 OS free of charge, at a rate of about 80,000 licenses per week, validating Sun's open source strategy and the R&D investment to create the most advanced OS on the planet. In less than one year, the Solaris 10 OS has set more than 46 performance world records and has a broad range of ISV support with over 1500 committed applications. In addition, the Solaris 10 OS currently offers one of the broadest ranges of platform choice in the industry with over 534 supported systems based on SPARC, AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon processor based systems from vendors as diverse as Dell, Fujitsu, IBM and HP and Sun. "The rapid adoption rate of the Solaris 10 OS continues to grow at a rate that even we didn't anticipate," said John Loicacono, executive vice president of Software, Sun Microsystems. "The innovation in the Solaris 10 OS coupled with our decision to open source the code, has made it the best operating system running on AMD x64, Intel or SPARC processor-based systems. For added value, the Solaris 10 OS is also available with our full suite of tools and our full suite of infrastructure software, the Java Enterprise System. Sun is uniquely positioned to offer the most complete, affordable, open OS available in the market." The Solaris 10 OS is available as a free download at sun.com. Driving the incredible interest in the advanced OS are many of the most innovative features in any operating system today, including Solaris Containers, Solaris Predictive Self Healing, and Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace). These features help customers to more effectively utilize system resources, and more quickly diagnose and resolve system issues in order to maximize the hardware investment and maintain availability. Sun made the source code to Solaris available at opensolaris.org under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). This OSI approved open source license allows developers to safely create innovative new solutions for distribution under their own terms. The Solaris 10 OS is indemnified by Sun, providing its customers and partners with patent, copyright and trademark infringement protection. The Sun Java Enterprise System is freely available to developers and ships with the Solaris 10 OS. The integrated suite of infrastructure software solutions can be deployed on any number of systems for $140/employee/year1. This revolutionary new business model can help to significantly reduce procurement costs and simplify the deployment of enterprise software. Sun Studio Tools on the OpenSolaris Operating System is a developer tool suite for building OpenSolaris and developing the highest performing applications to run on Solaris and OpenSolaris operating systems. Sun Studio software is being provided, free and unrestricted, to participants in the OpenSolaris community.