Sun Microsystems, Inc.
is a manufacturer of computer systems (many based around
the company's own SPARC microprocessor, but others based around
x86 processors manufactured by Intel
and AMD), computer hardware, computer software and
associated services.
The company was originally founded in
1982
and is headquartered in
Santa Clara,
California.
Sun is listed on NASDAQ under the ticker
SUNW. The company employs approximately 34,600 people,
and had revenue of US $13.783 billion, and
net income of over US $473 million
as of 2007.
Over the years, Sun has developed and supported many operating systems. The first Sun
workstations shipped with UniSoft V7 Unix, but Sun soon switched to SunOS, a
closed source operating system developed by customizing
BSD UNIX.
In the late 1980s however, AT&T, at that time the owner of UNIX System V, purchased 20% of
Sun, and the two companies jointly developed UNIX System V Release 4 ("SVR4"). SVR4
was used as the foundation of Sun's next operating system,
Solaris 2. Since that time, Solaris has been
through many upgrades, and since
2005,
the majority of Solaris source code has been released
under as
open source
under the CDDL
license.
Since
2002,
Sun has also been involved with
Linux, and supports
Red Hat Linux and
SuSE Linux on some of their systems.
Another Sun developed technology is the Java platform.
The Java platform consists of three main components:
the Java programming language, the Java virtual machine (JVM), and the
Java Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The design of the platform
has, since
1998,
been developed by a formalized community process known as the Java Community Process (JCP).
In November
2006,
Sun announced plans to release their implementation of Java under the
GPL,
and indeed immediately released their Java compiler and JVM under the
GPL.
Sun also the owner of the StarOffice office suite, which it obtained when it purchased the
StarDivision software company in
1999.
Although StarOffice is
closed source
software, it formed the basis for
OpenOffice.org which is an
open source
office suite, released under the
LGPL.
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