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.