Sun Microsystems will today release details of a new award program meant to spur growth and activity within the company's open-source efforts, according to a post by Sun's open-source officer, Simon Phipps, on his corporate blog. Are they finally acting on their statements at Java One that open source is Robin Hood in reverse — cash strapped programmers contributing code to rich corporations, or is it an attempt to subvert the open source ethos?

Far more interesting than any of the IP claims traded between Network Appliance and Sun Microsystems is the battle being waged between NetApp founder Dave Hitz and Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz. The two executives have decided to make a spectacle of their gripes, trading barbs via their blogs. Lawyers for both sides must feel revulsion, resentment and fear every time one of these loquacious nerds fires up his browser.

SUN paid a high price for positioning itself as the technology candyman to all those dotcom darlings consumed in the crash.

Sun seeks to apply the lessons of Linux and turn open source Solaris into an operating system to rival Linux and to be as commonly used as Java.

Jonathan Schwartz is a man on a mission. While at Linuxworld today, I took an hour to visit with Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems. After spending an hour prodding Jonathan with questions about Sun's history and future with open source, I was left with one clear impression:

Sun is rising, and open source is the driver behind its rebirth.

Sun's operating system chief and Debian author Ian Murdock was at OSCON, elaborating on Project Indiana. He covered, for the most part, ground we've already been over, which places Indiana as Sun's quasi copy of Red Hat's Fedora project. The core of the new project revolves around Sun's mission to release a fresh, supported version of OpenSolaris every six months.

The efforts of Microsoft to pressure the Linux community over alleged and unspecified patents is akin to "patent terrorism", according to a local executive for Sun Microsystems.

Looking to steal thunder from the Linux juggernaut or at least catch the same wave, Sun plans to release binaries in Spring 2008 for its OpenSolaris Unix platform, similar to how Linux is offered, as part of the company's Project Indiana.

Sun Microsystems announced it will release the Solaris Cluster source code through the HA (High Availability) Clusters community on the OpenSolaris site. Sun is releasing the Open High Availability Cluster in response to interest and feedback from the OpenSolaris community.

SUN's CIO Jonathan Schwarz invites Linus Torvalds for dinner to end the cynical dispute Linus started on LKML and to make the world a better place for everyone. An open letter to Linus about the competition of Linux and OpenSolaris and about SUN's interests in this market.

In a discussion about "Dual-Licensing Linux Kernel with GPL V2 and GPL V3" Linus is quite pessimistic about Sun's commitment to open source: "So they want to use Linux resources (_especially_ drivers), but they do *not* want to give anything back especially ZFS, which seems to be one of their very very few bright spots)."

You have to take a look at Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog today. He has pledged the company will use its patents to defend Red Hat and Ubuntu. That's the headline, and I'm really happy to know that Sun's very extensive patent portfolio is available, just in case it is ever needed. You never know these days. And yes, I take that as a message in a bottle to Microsoft. But he says it in such an interesting and creative way, I think you'll be glad if you go and read the entire entry.

Builder AU's Nick Gibson sat down with Sun Microsystems's Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps to find out what's the fallout of open sourcing Java, what he really thinks about GPL v3 and why Sun is living on the prayer of Open Source.

"You would be wise to listen to the customers you're threatening to sue - they can leave you, especially if you give them motivation. Remember, they wouldn't be motivated unless your products were somehow missing the mark."

Hoping to win the hearts and minds of millions of internet programmers, the giants of the software industry are starting to sing a new song: Free your software and developers will follow.