Sun Microsystems today announced its plan to release the source code of Solaris; the company’s Unix based operating system in an attempt to retail more of its hardware and services to enterprise customers.

According to industry reports, Sun has been suffering far more losses than its core rivals IBM and HP, but the company hopes to stabilize the sales of its hardware and services with the new strategy.

"The more people who run Unix and Solaris and open Solaris, the larger the opportunity is to sell the hardware, infrastructure and services necessary to put it into deployment," said Jonathan Schwartz, COO, Sun Microsystems in a telephone interview to Reuters.

He added, "Open source doesn't mean no revenue, it means no barriers to growing revenue."

Sun also commented that the new strategy will also allow the company to further compete against Windows from Microsoft, AIX from IBM and HP-UX from HP; these are all enterprise operating systems that directly compete against Solaris. Such operating systems are used in financial service centers, data centers, air traffic control and in various other processing intensive fields.

Solaris operates on Sun’s Sparc microprocessors as well as AMD’s Opteron server chips.

Sun additionally commented that the company has changed its strategy for a better future, and releasing the source code of Solaris is just the first step in making more changes to grow the company at a steady pace.

Sun said the source code for Solaris will be available on its website starting Tuesday.