Free and Open Source Software

GlassFish is a free, open source application server that implements the next version of the J2EE platform. Sun contributed the application server code base and continues to employ many engineers to work on the J2EE. Java EE 5 delivers ease of development features that make developers more efficient.

GNOME is a intuitive desktop environment supported on a wide variety of Unix and GNU/Linux platforms. Sun has contributed especially to the accessibility and localization of GNOME.

The Grid Engine project is an open source community effort to facilitate the adoption of distributed computing solutions. Sun opened half a million lines of code and continues to employ a team of developers on Grid Engine.

Java DB is Sun's supported distribution of the open source Apache Derby 100% Java technology database.

Java.net was formed by a diverse group of Sun engineers, researchers, technologists, and evangelists to provide a common site for Java technology conversations and development projects.

An open protocols set that allows any network connected device—from cell phones and wireless PDAs to PCs and servers—to communicate and collaborate in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner.

The Mobile & Embedded community site establishes a central location for the collaborative development of open source Java ME technologies and applications. Deployed in over 1.5 billion mobile and embedded devices, Java ME represents the ideal development platform for the creation and deployment of mobile data services. By open sourcing implementations of Java ME, Sun will enable the community to accelerate platform innovation, reduce development costs through the Java ME ecosystem, and, ultimately, drive a more consistent application platform.

Sun has been a major contributor to the work of the Mozilla foundation. Sun developers have been working on Section 508 compliance and internationalization (I18N).

NetBeans is an free and open source Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It's also an extensible platform which you can use to build OS-independent applications. Sun open sourced NetBeans in 2000. The NetBeans community now consists of hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

OpenDS is an open source community project building a free and comprehensive next generation directory service. OpenDS is designed to address large deployments, to provide high performance, to be highly extensible, and to be easy to deploy, manage and monitor. Initial development of OpenDS was done by Sun Microsystems, but is now available under an open source license.

OpenESB is first fully open source Enterprise Service Bus implementation based on the Java Business Integration specification and reference implementation. Sun has a team of over 10 engineers working on this project.

As the heart of the Java platform, Java SE is the execution engine and core development technology that enables the Java technology's "write once, run anywhere" promise. By open sourcing the Java Development Kit (JDK), Sun's implementation of Java SE, Sun hopes to make the Java platform a new foundation of innovation and enhance its value as the ubiquitous, essential infrastructure of the Internet experience.

The Open Media Commons is a community site for projects to develop unencumbered solutions for digital media. Current projects include Project DReaM, an open source, royalty-free and open standard Digital Rights Management (DRM) solution which will be independent of transport format. Other open source community projects are developing royalty-free codecs technology and streaming media services.

Open MPI is an open source implementation of MPI (Messaging Passing Interface) standard, a software library that is widely used in the creation of parallel, distributed high performance computing (HPC) applications. Sun is an active, contributing member of the Open MPI community, with its entire MPI engineering team working collaboratively to produce a high-quality, optimized, multi- platform implementation of MPI.

OpenCDS is based on the source code of the Sun Java System Content Delivery Server (CDS), released by Sun under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The project is creating a mobile content delivery and management platform that enables mobile operators to launch and sustain content services.

The Openprinting PAPI project is an open source implementation of the FSG OpenPrinting Open Standard Print API (PAPI). The project provides a set of specifications and implementations of software focused on creating standardized, scalable printing components for Solaris, GNU/Linux, or any other system with a set of POSIX interfaces. Sun has been involved in this project from the beginning. We continue to be a involved in the standards group that specified the interfaces and initiated and contributed much of the implementation of the standard in the SourceForge project.

The OpenOffice.org project was founded when Sun contributed several million lines of source code in 2000. Sun Microsystems remains still the main contributor of code.

The OpenSPARC project is making the hardware source code of the recently announced UltraSPARC T1 processor available under an Open Source license.

OpenSSO is an open source access management software distribution that provides the means to build authentication, authorization, and session management for Java and web applications and services. OpenSSO is maintained by a community of developers working closely with Sun engineers to promote the evaluation, use, and innovation of identity and access management technology.

Sun open sourced over 10 million lines of code in 2005 with the OpenSolaris project. Sun continues to sponsor the project by employing hundreds of software engineers who work on OpenSolaris, and by hosting the community site.

PostgreSQL is an high-performance object-relational database system, based on 20 years of development and sustained by a worldwide community of developers and companies. Sun sponsors PostgreSQL developers and provides test equipment for the project. Solaris users adopt PostgreSQL as an alternative to proprietary databases capable of high-volume OLTP workloads.

Sun actively participates in the Apache Roller and currently devotes three engineers to the project, who help to plan releases, write the code and grow the Roller community. We sponsor Roller development to support the requirements of our internal and external blog sites, to advance content syndication and web publishing technologies (RSS and Atom) and to provide a great blog server for the Java community.

X.Org is the open source reference implementation of the X Window System. Sun employs a number of engineers who contribute to X.org, including a member of the X.Org Board of Directors.