Free and Open Source Software

Open Source is About Sharing: Ideas, Code, Innovation

In Sun's view, open source is the ideal development and business model for today's massively connected, Participation Age economy. The open source model offers liberties to every user and developer that encourage genuinely collaborative innovation.

Open source software can lower customer barriers to: access, switching costs, and greater value achieved in an environment that allows for increased participation and competition. Companies gain compensation for their innovations by building on the contributions of others. In a first move towards open sourcing the Sun software portfolio, Sun has announced a no cost offering of its server side software.

Free and Open Source Licensing

Licensing plays an important role in shaping an open source community. Read about Sun's view on Free and Open Source licensing.

This whitepaper is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.

Open Source is About Diverse Communities

A project does not become open source simply by publishing its source code. It takes the creation and maintenance of communities of code, trusted gatekeepers, and symbiotic commercial enterprises.

In the Participation Age, being networked is assumed. As a pioneer of the Net, Sun recognizes that the way software is written and distributed has changed forever. Going forward, the process is about inclusiveness and sharing.

Open Source is Built on the Community Development Process

The freedom to run the software as you wish, study the source code and modify it, make and redistribute copies, and publish modified versions is absolutely key. What distinguishes projects like Apache, NetBeans, Linux, and GNOME is not the price tags of their deliverables, but how completely they embrace the community development process.

Open Source Must Deliver Freedom From Fear

To weaken the coercive power of intellectual property holders, Sun is uniquely extending protection through mechanisms like the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL) and our patent non-assertion covenant for OpenDocument format implementations. Because this kind of freedom lights a fire under innovation.

This is Just the Beginning

Today, we're facing a critical change in the economics of the software business: distribution and compensation will not necessarily happen at the same time. Sun made a huge bet on utility and grid computing: communities create and drive the standards that make utility computing possible.