We are making the binaries free, but we got Unix from somewhere else so we are limited to what we can do with that. Unix came from many many place and the license isn't open source. We are thinking of making the source available for download soon.

Under what license will it be available?

It is the Sun Public License which is like the Mozilla Public License, with the word Mozilla replaced with Sun.

What are the other Open Source projects at Sun?

We have opened up the source code of Star Office, called Open Office. We also plan to integrate Open Office with GNOME. We are contributing to the GNOME and the Mozilla effort. We are also adopting Gnome for our future desktop for Solaris.

We are also including many open source software such as Apache and Samba in the Solaris box now. These can also be downloaded from sunfreeware.com .

What about Solaris applications available on Linux?

There is very little today that is not available on Linux that is available on Solaris. In general we are focusing on API compatibility. What you will find is that moving Solaris applications over to Linux doesn't require much extra work at all. There is a good white paper on Red Hat's site. Anyone who has used the POSIX API is in pretty good shape. We want to ensure that Solaris is compatible with Linux.

Do you plan to support other platforms such as Intel?

We are currently doing extremely well with our Sparc based systems and I don't see any deviation from our Sparc line. On the applications side, it is a different story and I'm not going to comment on that now.

What about you acquisition of Cobalt Networks? Do you see it moving from Linux to Solaris there?

It would be pure speculation to see any change in direction of Cobalt. They will be allowed to do what they want to do since they have a world class team

So you support any other free operating system?

There are some elements that are common to other free operating systems in the areas where we are contributing to the open source.

What license is Java available and any plans on making it Open Source?

Java is community source and not Open Source. The Java community process allows the community of users to define which direction Java is going in. It is available for users free of charge. It offers the flexibility of write once, run anywhere. We would like to make it more open but we have had an issue with a certain large company.