Sun has announced the release of new systems based on AMD’s quad-core Opteron processors.

The new systems are the dual-socket 1U Sun Fire X4140, the dual-socket 2U Sun Fire X4240, and the quad-socket 2U Sun Fire X4440.

For the past three years, Sun’s “OpenSolaris” has only been available as a set of files to be unpacked on top of an already-installed Solaris 10 system. The first official stand-alone OpenSolaris release, OpenSolaris 2008.05, is now available for download at http://www.opensolaris.com.

According to the OpenSolaris General FAQ, SPARC support is not in this release but is planned for later in 2008. A six-month release and update schedule is planned.

Sun also announced that OpenSolaris will be an operating system option on Amazon’s EC2 Elastic Compute Cloud.

Sun today announced results for the fiscal third quarter 2008, ending on March 30th.

“Revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 were $3.266 billion, a decrease of 0.5 percent as compared with $3.283 billion for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Total gross margin as a percent of revenues was 44.9, an increase of 0.4 percentage points, as compared with the third quarter of fiscal 2007.

Net loss for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 on a GAAP basis was $34 million, or ($0.04) per share, as compared with net income of $67 million, or $0.07 per share, for the third quarter of fiscal 2007. In the third quarter of fiscal 2008, the company recorded a $52 million dollar tax provision, as compared to a tax benefit of $3 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2007. Net loss for the third quarter included charges related to the acquisition of MySQL, which reduced earnings per share by approximately $0.04.

Cash generated from operations for the third quarter of fiscal 2008 was $329 million, and the cash and marketable debt securities balance at the end of the quarter was $3.801 billion. During the third quarter, Sun continued to leverage its cash position, spending $300 million to repurchase 17.5 million shares of its common stock. There is currently $500 million remaining of the $3 billion share repurchase program announced in the company’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2007.“

According to this article from News.com, Sun has purchased a start-up named Montalvo. The acquired company is known for developing low-power, multiple core chip for portable computers. Additionally, the chip is compatible with current software developed for Intel and AMD processors.

Sun has launched its Solaris On Demand program, which provides the technology, infrastructure, hosting, and services needed for software developers to offer their products as a service.

Sun and Wind River Systems have announced that Wind River Systems will be porting its Carrier Grade Linux suite and development tools to work on Sun’s UltraSPARC T2 processor.

Sun has introduced MySQL Workbench, a visual database design and modeling tool. Currently available for Microsoft Windows, future releases are planned for Linux and Mac OS X.

The software is available in two versions - a free open source Community Edition, and a $99 commercial Standard Edition that includes support.

Sun has announced the release and pending general availability of MySQL 5.1, along with the MySQL Certified Storage Engine Program that enables storage engine developers to certify that their implementations have been tested and are compatible with MySQL.

Sun and Fujitsu have released the SPARC Enterprise T5140 and SPARC Enterprise T5240, both based around the “System-on-a-chip” UltraSPARC T2 Plus microprocessor.

OpenBSD now supports the UltraSPARC T1 processor according to this post by Mark Kettenis on the openbsd-announce mailing list:

Yesterday I committed the last bit of code to support machines with
Sun’s UltraSPARC T1 CPUs. Below is a dmesg for the SPARC Enterprise
T1000, and although other machines have not been tested yet, machines
like the SPARC Enterprise T2000 and Sun Blade T6300 are expected to
work too. As you can see, we support SMP right from the start.

All this is included in a standard OpenBSD/sparc64 kernel. Snapshots
with UltraSPARC T1 support are now available at ftp.openbsd.org and
its mirrors. It would be great if people could try these snapshots on
a few more UltraSPARC T1 machines.

LDOM support is not yet complete; I’m still working on drivers for
virtual network interfaces and virtual disks. But domains with access
to real hardware should work fine.

UltraSPARC T2 machines are not yet supported, but hopefully that’ll
change soon.

As seen on Jonathan Schwartz’s weblog:

But now that we’ve firmly established our reputation for open source leadership, I’m very worried there’s no more controversy to be had. There’s too much trust in the system, and too much clarity around our strategic intent. So it’s getting tougher and tougher to kick up a storm - and we can’t very well spend a billion dollars or change our ticker symbol every time we want to generate a headline. Now can we?

So today I’d like to unfurl the second chapter of our strategy.

We want you to give it all back. You couldn’t possibly believe we’d let you keep it, did you?

We specifically request that all free software originally distributed by Sun Microsystems, related to software or microprocessors, including but not limited to source files, binaries, derivatives, extensions, applications, patents, patent applications, copyrights, ideas, thoughts, and derivative thoughts, along with any and all mirrors thereof, be returned immediately.

According to this article from The New York Times (CNET), Sun was awarded a contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to research on ways to interconnect chips via laser light. If successful, a thousand-fold increase in computing power can be expected. However, Sun researchers indicated a high failure rate with the research, at 50%.

Sun has released its SAM/QFS product as Open Source under the CDDL.
The source code is available for immediate download. (Thanks to Ben Rockwood).

Sun is getting assistance from the NSA to improve its Solaris operating system. The NSA’s Flux Advanced Security Kernel (FLASK) architecture will be integrated into Solaris. Basically, Solaris is getting what Linux received four years ago (SELinux) from the NSA. More details located at this article, from internetnews.com.

Sun has announced that its Sun SPOT technology (both software and hardware) are available under the GPLv2 open source license.