According to this NEWS.COM article, Sun plans to begin selling its Solaris operating system under a subscription model, similar to Red Hat‘s software offerings. Under the plan, a company will pay for Solaris based on a per-employee subscription rate, and detailed pricing information will be available by the end of April.

This TechWeb article details Sun’s deal with MLB to handle the 2004 baseball season and beyond, including a new MLB data center.

According to this News.Com article, Wal-Mart has begun selling PCs that come with Sun’s version of Linux.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the Early Access release of its Java visual development environment, the Sun Java Studio Creator application development tool. The Early Access release will be available on April 8 at http://www.sun.com/jscreator.

Mozilla 1.7 beta for Solaris/SPARC is out.

Grab your copies from here:

GTK1 build, README

GTK2 build for the Sun Gnome desktop, README.

The builds include support for Calendar, Complex Text Support (for Thai, Hindi, Tamil etc.), SVG, and Xprint.

Please test the builds extensively and report any bugs.

Performance and Internals superhero Richard McDougall has a new article for Sun BluePrints entitled “Taming Your Emu to Improve Application Performance”, which explores some methods of tuning Solaris9’s Multiple Page Size Support (MPSS). Find the article link over on the Solaris Internals website. It’s good to see a site update over there.

GCN is reporting from FOSE 2004 where Scott finally commented on the growing movement to Open Source Java. As Scott unsuprisingly put it: “We’re trying to understand what problem does it solve that is not already solved.â€? And, to remind us of why we love him, his responce to IBM: “Go open source with DB2 and then you can tell me what to do with my assets.”

NextCom LLC has announced the availability of an enhanced version of its PowerSPARC product line targeted at deployable military-aerospace and homeland security applications. PowerSPARCII is the next generation mission critical and mission deployable enterprise open standards computing platform. This all in one Mobile Graphics Workstation and Mobile Server is reconfigurable, expandable, and deployable.

PowerSPARCII systems feature standard Sun distribution media Solaris 8 and 9, a magnesium alloy chassis, and passive cooling technology. Systems have UltraSPARC IIi 650MHz processors, up to 4Gb memory, and 160GB internal removable storage.

According to this TechWeb article, Scott McNealy addresses the CTIA Wireless show in Atlanta and announces several new partnerships.

News.Com describes the popularity of Sun’s Java in the wireless game market and Sun’s expansion into online game servers that can handle requests from both PCs and consoles games.

This TechWeb article details Sun’s new authorized resellers.

This morning Slashdot is reporting an article on LinuxPlanet reguarding Project Looking Glass. So far the sentament from the Linux community is the same as usual: “We already did that”. No real news yet however, just people starting to take notice.

The docs are up. Looks like Solaris Express program will now offer Solaris builds as beta releases from here out, and all naming is changing accordingly. Documentation can be found on docs.sun.com now(the password is in a text file with the ISOs on the Sun download page). The new additions since 02/04 (Build 51 or 52 depending on where you look) include numberous documentation changes and updates, the addition of Samba 3.0, several JumpStart improvments that are long overdue, changes to makecontext(3C), and Layered Driver Interfaces (LDI) which provides new levels of device driver observability. Also, some additional System V IPC resource controls have been added as well. Check out the Solaris 10 Beta 1 What’s New document for details.

Solaris10 3/04 has just been released. The “Whats New” document isn’t on the download page this month, and so far the doc hasn’t turned up on docs.sun.com, but interestingly there is a text file on the download page that contains the password to the documentation on docs.sun.com which is currently password protected. Something interesting with this release is that the ISOs are named “Beta1” instead of the typical internal build number, which means we’re getting close. Solaris10 is still rumored for an October 2004 release. Nab the ISOs in the usual place.

Elsewhere on the Solaris front, Solaris9 04/04 is in the pipe but not yet avalible. It should pop up any day now. No details yet as to what is new in that release beyond MUs.

Ben Perrault has made binary packages available for PostgreSQL, OpenSSL, and Kerberos, all compiled with Sun’s C compiler.