GOC

Sun Microsystems (News - Alert) has beefed up its open source strategy by bringing on board a well-known Linux software developer, Reuters reported Wednesday. Ian Murdock, creator of the Debian Linux OS, is now Sun’s chief operating platforms officer.

 

Murdock is being brought on board specifically to help market Sun’s Unix-based operating system, Solaris, Reuters reported. According spokesperson Jacki DeCoster, quoted in the report, Murdock is now in charge of overseeing Solaris marketing strategy.

 

This is just the latest move in Sun’s active strategy to strengthen its ties with the open source community. Last year, it turned Solaris into a truly open source product by making the OS code available for free, enabling developers to modify the software and distribute those modifications.

 

That license strategy is roughly the same as with Linux (an open, Unix-like operating system), which has been “open source” since its launch in 1990, Reuters said. The idea behind the openness is to Linux more popular among business users by encouraging developers to create applications that adds value to the OS.

 

Sun’s open source strategy is a similar one, the goal being to increase demand for Solaris, and by proxy the company’s other software and hardware products.

 

In a personal blog entry Monday, Murdock wrote about his experiences with Sun workstations, which he first discovered 15 years ago while a business student at Purdue University.

 

“Everything I know about computing I learned on those Sun workstations, as did so many other early Linux developers,” Murdock wrote.

 

Since that time, though, Murdock says that Sun systems have been on the decline, the result of growing popularity for Red Hat (News - Alert) Linux, especially among the newer generation of programmers.

 

“Sun was increasingly seen by this new generation as the vendor who didn’t “get it”, and Sun’s rivals did a masterful job running with that and painting the company literally built on open standards as ‘closed’,” Murdock said. “To those of us who knew better, it was a sad thing to watch.”

 

Now, he has the power to do something about it. And, he’s optimistic.

 

“The last several years have been hard for Sun, but the corner has been turned,” Murdock wrote in his blog. “Sun has successfully embraced x86, pioneered energy efficiency as an essential computing feature, open sourced its software portfolio to maximize the network effects, championed transparency in corporate communications, and so many other great things.”

 

So what’s the next step for Sun? Murdock said it lies in closing the usability gap with Linux. A strong focus on backward compatibility is also vital, even as Sun makes some necessary changes.  

 

“I’m pretty strongly of the opinion that Linux needs to play a clearer role in the platform strategy,” he summed it up.