January 27, 2005 – (HOSTSEARCH.COM) – www.internalmemos.com released an alleged Sun document revealing Sun plans to “cease manufacturing at our Newark, California plant and will transfer production activities to the Hillsboro, Oregon and Linlithgow, Scotland sites. This will result in the elimination of the positions of approximately 300 employees.”
Sun’s recent release of 1,600 patents for the Sun Solaris 10 OS to the open source community has been called “too little too late” and a desperation move by some industry analysts who see Sun as to autocratic to manage the development of the OS in an open source forum. With Linux far ahead in terms of aggregating a developer base there is some merit to this claim however some smaller companies have hailed the release of the patents and point to Sun’s technological advancements as good reason to expect developers to be attracted to working with the code.
Could it be the beginning of all-against Microsoft in an industry wide open source shift or the beginning of the end for Sun as a major player? Whichever the case, for 300 Sun employees it’s the beginning of unemployment.
