ACADEMIA

SAN FRANCISCO -- Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:SUNW) today announced that it has entered into a global alliance agreement with Red Hat (NYSE:RHAT) to distribute Red Hat's market leading Enterprise Linux operating system, and to broaden the use of each other's technologies in the rapidly growing volume server marketplace. As part of the agreement, Red Hat will distribute Sun's Java Virtual Machine (JVM) with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, extending the reach of the world's most popular application environment. Sun will sell and support all x86 versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux including Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES and Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS. "This global alliance underscores Java's central role in the evolution of the Internet and the critical function open source and communities play in driving innovation," said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president, software, Sun Microsystems. "The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Sun's x86 systems affirms our commitment to the open source community. This relationship is the first of many efforts we expect to drive together with Red Hat on the Linux and Java front." Today's announcements underscore Sun's commitment to choice, innovation and value. The combination of Java and Linux gives customers a compelling, cost-effective, and reliable alternative to proprietary offerings from Microsoft. Customers will benefit from the latest high performance JVM on systems that use the Solaris(TM) operating system or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In collaboration with Red Hat, Sun will provide global services and support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Sun will support customers in heterogeneous environments including Solaris, the Solaris x86 Platform Edition and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and will continue to support all existing Sun Linux customers to ensure their business continuity and investment protection. Broadening its commitment for standard Linux distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a continuation of Sun's strategy to offer CIOs a choice of operating systems under Project Orion, Sun's systematic approach for delivering customers an integrated and open standards-based software system. Sun will also make its Sun(TM) ONE products available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. "We are excited to be partnering with Sun to provide enterprise customers and software developers with our standards-based operating platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is built on open source technology, and is proven as a secure, reliable, and high performing environment," said Tim Buckley, chief operating officer, Red Hat. "Sun's decision to implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux for their hardware and software solutions furthers our goal to expand offerings to customers who want to develop and deploy integrated solutions on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Java, from the smallest of devices to multi node clusters." "Oracle is very pleased to further strengthen our relationship with Sun and Red Hat and extend our commitment to Linux," said Dave Dargo, vice president, system platforms division, Oracle Corp. "Oracle's industry leading software available on this compelling combination of technologies will deliver exceptional value to enterprise customers." Customers will benefit from the growing portfolio of applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux by gaining access to a wide range of business solutions. To ensure maximum flexibility for Sun customers, Sun will also support Red Hat Enterprise Linux on third-party Red Hat certified hardware. Availability Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions will be available from Sun by summer 2003 and will be supported on the recently announced x86 based systems, the Sun Fire(TM) V60x and V65x systems. Future x86 products from Sun will also support Red Hat Enterprise Linux. To download Java today and get more information on Sun's highest performance JVM, please visit www.java.sun.com/getjava.