Silicon Graphics

A line of lower cost processors meant for lowend systems which include the microSPARC I, microSPARC II, UltraSPARC IIe, UltraSPARC IIi, and UltraSPARC IIIi.In the mid 1990s the company started to transform itself into a vendor of largescale Symmetric multiprocessing servers. Sun manufactured and marketed the 8processor SPARCserver 1000 and 20processor SPARCcenter 2000 both of which built on work done in conjunction with Xerox PARC in the late 1990s this transition was accelerated by the acquisition of Cray Business Systems Division from Silicon Graphics. Cray's 32bit CS6400 Superserver, related to the SPARCcenter, was superseded by a 64bit joint design by Cray and Sun which was transformed into the very successful Sun Enterprise 10000 largescale server. Driven by the increased prominence of webserving databasesearching applications, blade servers high density rackmounted systems were also emphasized.The UltraSPARC T1 is notable for its use of eight cores with four threads per core.

This is part of an industry move toward horizontal rather than vertical scaling, i.e. the use of more CPUs with lower clock rates. This is of particular importance in data centers where hard disks and processors make the largest demands on power and, consequently, generate the most heat. In December 2005, Sun announced the OpenSPARC T1, an open source hardware design of UltraSPARC T1.In April 2007, Sun released the SPARC Enterprise server products, which Sun collaborated with Fujitsu with the design. The Mclass offers mainframe reliability and availability.The SPARC processors designed by Sun are manufactured by Texas Instruments.In the late 1980s, Sun also marketed an Intel 80386based machine, the Sun386i this was designed to be a hybrid system, running SunOS but at the same time supporting DOS applications. This only remained on the market for a brief period of time. A followup 486i upgrade was announced but only a few prototype units were ever manufactured.

Sun's brief first foray into x86 systems ended in the early 1990s, when it was decided to concentrate on SPARC and retire the last Motorola systems and 386i products this move was dubbed by McNealy as all the wood behind one arrowhead. Even then, Sun kept its hand in the x86 world, as a release of Solaris for PC compatibles began shipping in 1993.In 1997 Sun acquired Diba, Inc., followed later by the acquisition of Cobalt Networks in 2000, with the aim of building network appliances single function computers meant for consumers. Sun also marketed a network computer diskless workstation, as popularized by Oracle Corporation CEO Larry Ellison. Although none of these business initiatives were particularly successful, the Cobalt purchase gave Sun a toehold for its return to the x86 hardware market. In 2002, Sun introduced its first general purpose x86 system, the LX50, based in part on previous Cobalt system expertise. This was also Sun's first system announced to support Linux as well as Solaris.

In 2003, Sun announced a strategic alliance with AMD to produce marketleading x86x64 servers based on AMD's Opteron processor this was followed shortly by Sun's acquisition of Kealia, a startup founded by original Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, which had been focusing on highperformance AMDbased servers.
On September 12, 2005, Sun unveiled a new range of Opteron based servers the Sun Fire X2100, X4100 and X4200 servers. These were designed from scratch by the team led by Bechtolsheim to address heat and power consumption issues commonly faced in data centers and were the first servers to display Sun's new brushed aluminum design. In July 2006, the Sun Fire X4500 and X4600 systems were introduced, extending what is now a line of x64 systems that support not only Solaris, but Linux and Microsoft Windows as well.

On January 22, 2007, Sun announced a broad strategic alliance with Intel.49 Intel now endorses Solaris as a mainstream operating system and as its mission critical UNIX OS for its Xeon processorbased systems. In return Sun has begun using the Intel Xeon processor in its x64 server line, starting with the Sun Blade X6250 server module, introduced in June 2007.Although initially known as a hardware company, Sun's software history began with its founding in 1982 cofounder Bill Joy was one of the leading Unix developers of the time, having already contributed the vi or, the C shell, and significant work on the TCPIP stack to the BSD Unix OS. Since then, Sun has developed and acquired other software, and become widely known for the Java programming language.

Sun is known for communitybased and opensource licensing of its major technologies, and for its support of its products with other open source technologies. Sun offers GNOMEbased desktop software called Java Desktop System originally codenamed Madhatter, first distributed as a Linux implementation but now offered as part of the Solaris operating system. It supports its Java Enterprise System a middleware stack on Linux. It has released the source code for Solaris under the opensource Common Development and Distribution License, via the OpenSolaris community. Sun's positioning includes a commitment to indemnify users of some software from intellectual property disputes concerning that software. The announced business model is the sale of support services on a variety of bases, including peremployee and persocket.

Sun is most well known for its Unix systems, which have a reputation for system stability and a consistent design philosophy.Sun's first workstation shipped with UniSoft V7 Unix. Later in 1982 Sun began providing SunOS, a customized 4.1BSD Unix, as the operating system for its workstations.In the late 1980s, AT&T tapped Sun to help them develop the next release of their branded UNIX, and in 1988 announced they would purchase up to a 20% stake in Sun. UNIX System V Release 4 SVR4 was jointly developed by AT&T and Sun this partnership triggered concern among Sun's competitors, many of whom banded together to form the Open Software Foundation OSF. By the mid1990s, the ensuing Unix wars had largely subsided, AT&T had sold off their Unix interests, and the relationship between the two companies was significantly reduced.Sun used SVR4 as the foundation for Solaris 2, which became the successor to SunOS.From 1992 Sun also sold INTERACTIVE UNIX, an operating system it acquired when it bought INTERACTIVE Systems Corporation from Eastman Kodak Company.

 This was a popular UNIX variant for the PC platform and a major competitor to market leader SCO UNIX. Sun's focus on INTERACTIVE UNIX diminished in favor of Solaris on both SPARC and x86 systems it was dropped as a product in 2001.Sun offers a secure variant of Solaris called Trusted Solaris. Solaris 10 included many of the same capabilities as Trusted Solaris when it was released in 2005 Trusted Solaris 8 the Solaris 10 1106 update included Solaris Trusted Extensions, which give it the remaining capabilities needed to make it the functional successor to Trusted Solaris. In short, Trusted Solaris is now included with Sun's free Solaris 10 software and the operating system is by default configured for the highest level of security.Sun has included Linux as part of its strategy since 2002, following several years of difficult competition and loss of server market share to competitors' Linuxbased systems. Sun supports both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on its x64 systems companies such as Canonical Ltd., Wind River Systems and MontaVista also support their versions of Linux on Sun systems.

Free software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions only to ensure that further recipients can also do these things. To make these acts possible, the human readable form of the program  must be made available. The source code may be either accompanied by a software license saying that the copyright holder permits these acts  or be released into public domain, so that these rights automatically hold.Alternative terms for free software have been coined in an attempt to make the use of free less ambiguous. The most common is opensource software, which has since evolved to refer to a subtly different sense of freedom. Free software is also known as software libre, free, libre and opensource software FLOSS, and free and opensource software FOSS.Free software is distinct from freeware freeware is proprietary software made available free of charge. One can use, but not study, modify or redistribute freeware.

Since free software may be freely redistributed, free software generally is available at very little cost. Free software business models are usually based on adding value such as support, training, customization, integration, or certification. At the same time, some business models which work with nonfree software are not compatible with free software, such as those that depend on a user having no choice but to pay for a license in order to lawfully use a software product.
The free software movement was launched in 1983 to make these freedoms available to every computer user. Software that does not provide these freedoms is referred to as proprietary software or nonfree software.In the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it was normal for computer users to have the freedoms provided by free software. Software was commonly shared by individuals who used computers and by hardware manufacturers who were glad that people were making software that made their hardware useful.

In the 70s and early 80s, the increasing complexity of software applications drove the industry to protect their investments through application of copyright law, and they began using technical measures such as only distributing binary copies to prevent computer users from being able to study and modify the software.
In 1983, Richard Stallman launched the GNU project after becoming frustrated with the effects of the change in culture of the computer industry and users. Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation FSF was founded in October 1985. He introduced a free software definition and copyleft, designed to ensure software freedom for all.
Free software is a huge international effort, producing software used by individuals, large organizations, and governmental administrations. Free software has a very high market penetration in serverside Internet applications such as the Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP scripting language. Completely free computing environments are available as large packages of basic system software such as the many Linux distributions and FreeBSD.

Free software developers have also created free versions of almost all commonly used desktop applications such as web browsers, office productivity suites, and multimedia players. It is important to note, however, that in many categories, free software for individual workstation or home users has only a fraction of the market share of their proprietary competitors. Most free software is distributed online without charge, or offline at the marginal cost of distribution, but this is not required, and people may sell copies for any price.The economic dvantagesof the free software model have been recognized by large corporations such as IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. Many companies whose core business is not in the IT sector choose free software for their Internet information and sales sites, due to the lower initial capital investment and ability to freely customize the application packages. Also, some nonsoftware industries are beginning to use techniques similar to those used in free software development for their research and development scientists, for example, are looking towards more open development processes, and hardware such as microchips are beginning to be developed with specifications released under copyleft licenses see the OpenCores project, for instance. Creative Commons and the free culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement.

Free software played a part in the development of the Internet, the World Wide Web and the infrastructure of dotcom companies . Free software allows users to cooperate in enhancing and refining the programs they use free software is a pure public good rather than a private good. Companies that contribute to free software can increase commercial innovation amidst the void of patent cross licensing lawsuits. Under the free software business model, free software vendors may charge a fee for distribution and offer pay support and software customization services. Proprietary software uses a different business model, where a customer of the proprietary software pays a fee for a license to use the software. This license may grant the customer the ability to configure some or no parts of the software themselves. Often some level of support is included in the purchase of proprietary software, but additional support services especially for enterprise applications are usually available for an additional fee. Some proprietary software vendors will also customize software for a fee.

Free software is generally available at little to no cost and can result in permanently lower costs compared to proprietary software. With free software, businesses can fit software to their specific needs by changing the software themselves or by hiring programmers to modify it for them. Free software often has no warranty, and more importantly, generally does not assign legal liability to anyone. However, warranties are permitted between any two parties upon the condition of the software and its usage. Such an agreement is made separately from the free software license.There is debate over the security of free software in comparison to proprietary software, with a major issue being security through obscurity. A popular quantitative test in computer security is using relative counting of known unpatched security flaws. Generally, users of this method advise avoiding products which lack fixes for known security flaws, at least until a fix is available. Some claim that method counts more vulnerabilities for the free software, since their source code is accessible and their community is more forthcoming about what problems exist.

Free software advocates rebut that closed source programs do not have published flaws, but flaws could exist and are possibly already known to malicious users. The ability to view and modify the software provides many more people who can analyze the code, and possibly have a higher rate of finding bugs and flaws than an average corporation. Having access to the source code also makes creating spyware far more difficult.For the first decade of Sun's history, the company was predominantly a vendor of technical workstations, competing successfully as a lowcost vendor during the Workstation Wars of the 1980s.Sun originally used the Motorola 68k CPU family for the Sun1 through Sun3 computer series. The Sun1 employed a 68000 CPU, the Sun2 series, a 68010. The Sun3 series was based on the 68020, with the later Sun3x variant using the 68030.Sun has implemented multiple highend generations of the SPARC architecture, including SPARC, SuperSPARC, UltraSPARC I, UltraSPARC II, UltraSPARC III, UltraSPARC IV and currently UltraSPARC IV+ & UltraSPARC T1UltraSPARC T2. Sun has developed several generations of workstations and servers, including the SPARCstation series, Sun Ultra series, Sun Fire and Sun Enterprise originally Ultra Enterprise servers and the Sun Blade workstations.Most free software is distributed online without charge, or offline at the marginal cost of distribution, but this is not required, and people may sell copies for any price.The economic dvantagesof the free software model have been recognized by large corporations such as IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. Many companies whose core business is not in the IT sector choose free software for their Internet information and sales sites, due to the lower initial capital investment and ability to freely customize the application packages.