Sun spokesman Russ Castronovo confirmed in the report that an open source Solaris is currently in the development phase. However, he declined to comment on how much the operating system would be made open source and did not say when Sun planned to release it.

A potential release of the Solaris operating system under an open source license has been the subject of considerable debate at Sun Microsystems. According to analysts, if Sun does not go open source by the end of the year, the release will become largely irrelevant given the pace at which Linux is advancing.

Sun has been losing ground to Linux servers running Intel-based systems. According to Gartner (gartner.com), revenue of Linux-based server hardware rose 57.3 percent over the first quarter this year.