It is certainly no secret that Sun claims to be the second-highest contributor to the Open Source world. Well NewsForge reports that with the possibilities surrounding Solaris, they plan on making the release of version 10 an event that no one will forget.

Personally, I believe that if you provide support in order to make working with Solaris an enjoyable experience, the rest sort of takes care of itself. Then again, perhaps I am way off base here. After all, I’m hardly a developer.

OK, so Sun Microsystems, which claims to be the second-highest contributor overall in the open source software community (BSD is No. 1), is seriously getting back into the open source mix, thanks to the newly opened Solaris 10. In the past, anybody who had to sign a licensing agreement with Sun involving either Solaris or Java software would certainly not agree with the assessment that Sun was open source anything. Times have changed, and so has Sun. Apparently.

At the Solaris 10 launch event here at the Technology Museum of Innovation in San Jose today, Sun Chairman Scott McNealy was asked how Sun was planning to gain the trust of the open source community, so it could realize its strategic mission of building a thriving new community around its front-line enterprise operating system. McNealy looked a roomful of reporters in the eyes, put aside the spin for a minute, and said: “We will have to earn it (trust). We have to step it up. We will have to show them by our products and actions that we are serious about doing this right.”