Sun to Unbundle Solaris 9

Sun Microsystems Inc. on Friday will announce plans to release an unbundled version of the Solaris 9 operating environment for non-Sun x86 hardware for $99 for a single CPU system.

After months of indecision, Sun will now ship Solaris 9 x86, unbundled, supporting both the Sun hardware platform, for both current and future products, as well as the same list of all hardware supported for Solaris 8, according to Sun officials in Palo Alto, Calif. Early access to the Solaris 9 bits will come in the next four to eight weeks, and the final product will ship in the January time-frame, they said.

The announcement brings to an end months of uncertainty about Sun's intentions in this regard. In early January the Palo Alto, Calif., company announced that it had decided to defer the productization of the Solaris 9 Intel version; a week later it announced plans to meet a group of customers and developers to try to work out a compromise; and in August it announced that it would only support Solaris 9 on Sun x86 hardware.

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