OpenSolaris

Frustrated by what they consider poor treatment and lack of interest from Oracle, members of the OpenSolaris Governing Board are essentially delivering an ultimatum to the vendor, asking that it appoint a liaison to the group by no later than Aug. 16, or else the board will be disbanded.

Oracle has moved Solaris onto its quarterly security patch schedule, meaning users of the Sun Microsystems operating system will now know months in advance when they will be getting security updates.

Lines are beginning to blur between the open source and commercial versions of the Sun Microsystems Solaris Unix operating system.

Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems -- fierce competitors when it comes to hardware sales -- unveiled an expanded partnership on Wednesday that will see HP become a key distributor of Sun's Solaris 10 operating system.

Solaris has been Sun Microsystems's bread-and-butter Unix system since 1992. While Unix platforms such as Solaris now are up against the open source Linux juggernaut, Sun maintains it has the technological advantages and accommodations for open source to keep Solaris in the game. The company also cites important customer wins as evidence of the platform's continued strength. To hash out the state of Solaris in today's marketplace, InfoWorld editor at large Paul Krill recently met with Jim McHugh, vice president of Solaris marketing at Sun, at the company's California campus.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

C++ developers using Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris OS have a new tool from Intel for optimizing their applications to run on multicore processors, Intel said on Thursday.

Sun and the OpenSolaris community are this week launching the official first version of the open-source OpenSolaris operating system, which has only been available in pre-release versions for developers until now.

Sun's quest to position OpenSolaris as a robust alternative to Linux is still hampered by myths surrounding the open source operating system and the software's own limitations.

A high-profile figure in Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris community has quit, accusing Sun of retaining too much control over the open-source counterpart to its Solaris operating system.