|
February 15, 2002
William N. Joy
Chief Scientist
Sun Microsystems,
Inc.
901 San Antonio Road
Palo Alto, CA 94303
Dear Mr. Joy,
As part of the user
community's effort to convince the Sun Software Division to continue
supporting Solaris x86, we have come up with a proposal to help Sun
port the various software components of the Cobalt product from Linux
to Solaris. It requires significant investments from Sun, but we
think it could have great rewards both in real sales and public
relations. Sun will need assistance from an academic to help further
develop and implement the proposal. We suspect that Sun already
sponsors faculty for exactly this type of project. Unfortunately, we
have been told that the Software Division is short in funding due to
the economic downturn and that proposals like these will have to
wait. Perhaps you can forward this to someone in Sun who could help
coordinate the sharing of costs and manpower across divisions?
Thank you.
John Groenveld
www.save-solaris-x86.org
attachment
Call for Proposals for Sun
Cobalt Port Competition
[published in
Communications of ACM]
Sun Microsystems is
currently soliciting proposals from undergraduate and graduate
computer science departments to port the various components of the
Cobalt product from Linux to Solaris. Proposals will be due in July.
Winners will be
selected based on how well they integrate their port effort into
their curriculum and their ability to meet the January 2003
deadline.
Winning departments
must demonstrate their desire to provide exposure to real-world
issues in the technology industry to their students including:
project management, software engineering, portable coding, and
secure programming.
Winners will be
required to gain non-disclosure agreements from participating
students.
Winners will receive a
Sun Enterprise Server with sufficient Sun Storage which will used to
host the Cobalt source repository.
All students in the
winning departments will receive copies of Solaris x86 and Forte
development tools.
Within each of the
winning departments, Sun will sponsor a competition for students for
the most innovative and useful tool used in the porting and
debugging process. The tool will then be released on www.sun.com as
community source. The winning students will receive Sun Blade 100
workstations.
Sun will sponsor guest
lectures from its senior engineers to various courses which have
incorporated the project into their course.
Sun will sponsor an
issue of ACM's student magazine, Crossroads, featuring the articles
written by each department's students relating to the project.
Benefits to Sun
Microsystems
Porting Cobalt to Solaris
Provides Sun with a
SPARC upgrade path which currently does not exist.
Returns Sun to the Sun
One, "One solution across the enterprise," strategy.
Demonstrates to
customers that Sun is committed to Solaris operating system.
Demonstrates a
commitment to the SPARC architecture.
Creates tools and
develops best practices to help customers and ISVs port Linux
applications to Solaris.
Creates a potential
application to sell to existing Sun installations.
Sponsoring Universities to
perform the work.
Fosters mind-share
among tomorrows technology leaders.
Encourages students to
install Solaris as well as Linux, BSD, and Windows on their desktop
machines.
Demonstrates Sun's
continued commitment to Higher Education.
|