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Sun Microsystems officially launched OpenSolaris (OS) today. Available pre-built as a combo live/install CD. ... OpenSolaris is licensed under Sun's CDDL license, accepted as an "open source" license by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), despite incompatibilities with many other open source licenses, such as the GPL. ... In the past, Sun has talked about using the GPL3 for OpenSolaris. Linux creator Linus Torvalds has notably said he might reconsider advocating a GPL3 release of Linux, should Sun follow through.

A browser plug-in for JavaFX will be featured in the Java SE (Standard Edition) 6 Update 10 release due this fall. Both Adobe, with its Flash platform, and Microsoft, with Silverlight, are offering plug-in platforms for rich Internet applications. But Sun plans to provide the industry-leading rich client with JavaFX, said Param Singh, Sun senior director of Java marketing. The Java runtime helps make this possible, he stressed during an interview at the JavaOne conference on Thursday afternoon. "The Java runtime is on over 900 million desktops today," Singh said. Every month, there are 40 million downloads of updates to the Java runtime, he said. Additionally, there are more than 2.2 mobile phones with Java on them, not to mention Java's presence in 100 percent of Blu-ray devices, said Singh. "The notion is, we will take JavaFX where the Java runtime is available," Singh said. Sun's JavaFX plug-in will enable deployment of applications that can work either in or outside of the browser, Singh said. This ability to run applications inside or outside of a browser is similar to what Adobe is offering with its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software.

Very large collection of links to Groklaw articles dealing with Sun and Solaris, with article titles and dates, arranged chronologically. With the Microsoft cloud running atop Solaris, this is likely to be a useful research tool to access relevant historical information.

But Sun CTO Bob Brewin emphasized in an interview that JavaFX Script features a new set of capabilities such as allowing development of applications that can be moved outside the browser. JavaFX Script also is designed for content authors, not necessarily developers alone. ... With JavaFX and the Java 6 Update 10 release, also called Consumer JRE (Java Runtime Environment), developers can deploy applications to browsers and have applets dragged out onto the desktop. Brewin also filled in details about Sun's cloud services effort, called Project Hydrazine. It is to feature an infrastructure enabling developers to run services on the Web such as mapping, location, calendaring, and e-mail services. Due next year, Hydrazine is to be part of Sun's network.com grid infrastructure. Also part of Hydrazine is Project Insight, which will measure who is visiting Web sites. Developers will be able to find who is using their service and perhaps could deliver targeted advertising. Hydrazine combines attributes offered in Microsoft's Live Mesh data folder-sharing service, the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Web-based service and Google Analytics, Brewin said.

"Sun Microsystems demos two new JavaFX-powered applications, Photo Flocker and Movie Cloud, at its annual JavaOne Conference in San Francisco Tuesday." Part of the JavaFX package is new codecs. The video on this page demos the high-definition video codecs and 3-D effects., plus some sound. The HD video impressed me. It's noticeably better than normal video fare on the web.

IBM's Arnaud La Hors on why Microsoft should be blamed for what is inevitable given that ODF is not designed for interoperability and is not application-neutral. One might rationally fault Microsoft for not having joined the ODF TC earlier, but the ODF TC studiously avoided enabling interoperability even among ODF implementations and ODF has almost no mandatory conformity requirements, with application-specific extensions classified as conformant. The real ODF standard is the OOo code base controlled by Sun Microsystems. IBM played along with that game and cloned the OOo code base instead of fighting on the TC to make the myth of ODF interoperability come true. I don't see a lot of moral high ground for IBM here.

Brian figures out that the document wars are really about Cloud Computing. Big vendors IBM, Sun, Google and Microsoft are jockeyign for position in our cloud computing future. And this is why Microsoft MUSt get ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML! What Brian misses is the key to a Microsoft Cloud that can be found int he MSOffice SDK; the OOXML<>XAML conversion component. XAML, Silverlight and Smart Tags replace W3C XHTML-CSS, SVG-Flash, and RDF. Makign the MS Cloud one where Microsoft owned protocols, formats and .NET components dominate all processes. ISO approval of MSOffice-OOXML establishes MSOffice as a standards "editor", thus masking the cloud computing shift to XAML. A shift that will lock out all other Web 2.0 - Cloud providers dependent on Open Web - W3C protocols and formats!

Note that Brian posted this article in February, on the eve of the Geneva BRM. Since then ISO has gone on to approve MSOffice-OOXML. Note also that, a week prior to this publication, i had sent Brian a lengthy discussion entitled "Windows can't do Cloud Computing", where all of these issues were discussed except for the IBM motivations. Not wanting to interfere with the upcoming Geneva BRM and vote, I had declined Brian's request to publish.

The developer site for OpenSolaris High Performance Computing project. Site contains major clues about things to come with OpenSolaris, e.g., the Projects index page includes entries for KDE and Gnome porting projects.

"JavaFX will, like all of Sun's software platforms, be made freely available as open source, and it'll be released via the GPL (v2) license." But note that Schwartz stretches the truth mightily here. E.g., Solaris is under the CDDL license, OpenOffice.org was just changed to LGPLv3 from LGPLv2, on and on.

As part of Sun's effort to enable consumers to innovate, Green introduced JavaFX, a rich Internet application environment set to compete with Adobe Systems' AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight.