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At the beginning of the year Sun announced that it would release an open-source Solaris 10 under its CDDL licence. It seems to have worked. The company says that it has distributed more than three million registered licenses for the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) since the new version of the operating system became available on January 31. That's more than a year ahead of its target according to Sun president Jonathan Schwartz. According to Sun, customers and partners download the Solaris 10 OS free of charge, at a rate of about 80,000 licenses per week.

The company has also released a new version of Java ES to support Solaris 10 OS, Windows 2000, Linux and HP-UX environments. As part of its cross platform support deal with Microsoft, the company has also pledged to support Windows 2003 Server within the next 90 days.

Having brought it

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into line, Sun says that it will support Windows simultaneously with all future releases of Java ES. Sun is also bringing enhanced service oriented architecture (SOA) capabilities and a complete developer solution to Java ES for $140 for each seat per year.

Schwartz noted in his blog that Sun has signed its first tier 1 systems vendor for the Solaris platform in the form of IBM in its BladeCenter range. But he is also after the rest of the pack, telling HP and Dell 'the invitation remains open: we'd love to partner around the fastest growing open source operating system the market's ever seen.'

The company is also claiming Common Criteria certification at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4+. What this means is that the various components of the Solaris OS has met some of the toughest security criteria in the world and is considered vital for sales to government agencies - particularly the military.

Common Criteria evaluation itself is an agreed upon standard for independent certification of various security claims for IT products. The Protection Profiles and Evaluation Assurance Levels are agreed and accepted by more than 22 different countries around the world as a basic requirement for technology installed and operating in high security facilities.

Finally, Computer Associates has announced an expanded relationship under which CA will port its Unicenter and BrightStor solutions to the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) for x64 platforms.