A few years ago Sun adopted an open source business model. I get the impression that back then they decided to freshen their entire product line, and we are now starting to see the fruits of their labor.

OpenSolaris reached first release this month after a few years of development. It brings an almost three decade mature UNIX platform onto the desktop with the usability of Ubuntu Linux. It still has some work to be done, but it looks very promising. I'm looking forward to Solaris 11 for servers with the new package system and clean install. In some forums I read that there may never be a Solaris 11, just OpenSolaris from now on.

I also subscribe to the OpenDS mailing list and after two years of development they are at a 1.0 release. Already there are people talking about switching over from OpenLDAP and other products.

Not too long ago I remember reading blogs and comments from people saying that Sun should just give up with NetBeans and build an IDE on top of Eclipse like everyone else. With the release of NetBeans 6.0 and especially 6.1 I'm seeing more and more people give it a try or switch over completely. I've even seen a number of IntelliJ IDEA people talk about how NetBeans is at a point where they can switch to it as a primary IDE. I guess hell has frozen over.

I'm noticing the same thing happening with the GlassFish application server. It wasn't too long ago that people wouldn't consider GlassFish because they thought it wasn't production ready. With the release of GlassFish V2 things have changed and there is now a significant community of production users. The mailing list is also very active and helpful. I think that the release GlassFish V3 will be a real tipping point. A light weight application server with a full featured web admin console, command line tools, clustering, open source, great documentation, commercial support, active mailing list, and Java EE 6 if you want it. V3 will have tons of new features, many of which were suggestions from the community. How can Tomcat continue to compete with that?

OpenSSO is also getting a lot of press these days. They are making one of the industry's most full featured single-signon products usable by mere mortals.

I wonder when we'll see the Sun stock go up significantly? I expected it to go up with the release of the UltraSPARC T2 processor - the most incredible processor in the world. It was under development for the past 5 years. Maybe the stock went up a bit, but not significantly. Maybe people are waiting to see if an open source business model will really work. I read complaints from people saying that Sun doesn't provide investors with enough detail about software income. Maybe that will change soon?