I'LL SEE YOUR 500, AND RAISE YOU 1,170: SUN HAS open sourced OpenSolaris and 1,670 of its patents and promised that more will follow in the second quarter of the year.

In a conference call to hacks, Sun Chairman and CEO Scott McNealy declared Sun to be the largest donor of open source code anywhere on planet earth.

The release follows IBM's open sourcing of 500 patents last week. McNealy said that unlike "a lot of companies" Sun was not using open source to dispose of end-of-life code.

The initial piece of Solaris being made available now is DTrace performance analysis technology. Other Solaris source code, such as file system and security technologies, will be offered in the second quarter of this year.