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Press Kit
Open source plays an important role in the growth of the Solaris Operating System.
In the year since Sun opened the source code of the Solaris software development build, code-named Nevada, under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), the OpenSolaris project community has blossomed all over the world. This has been driven by the steady adoption rate of the Solaris 10 OS, with more than 5 million registered downloads -- more than its competitors have shipped collectively in the last 18 months, and more than all previous versions of the Solaris OS combined.
With the emergence of open source development, Sun is opening more and more of its intellectual property, in turn creating opportunities for partnerships and technical innovation. Open source development enables the growth of an interdependent network of business opportunities around a particular technology. In this so-called ecosystem, all participants have a common interest in the quality and success of the platform.
"Sun believes that you can win without everybody else having to lose," says Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer and member of the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB)."We're adjusting Sun for the coming market, not the passing market. In the coming market, you will earn revenue when your customer derives value from your technology, not when they are acquiring it. At acquisition, the important thing will be to be as available as possible to developers and system administrators building the customer solution."
Last December this philosophy led Sun to make an entire platform of the Solaris Operating System, the Sun Java Enterprise System, developer tools, desktop infrastructure, and the Sun N1 management software all available for free as the Solaris Enterprise System.
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