Open source and Java feel first Sun cuts

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Sun Microsystems axed 1,300 employees on Thursday, the first wave in a series of planned redundancies intended to cut head count by almost a fifth.

The company said in a statement it had cut workers across all levels, including employees in vice president and director positions.

It did not say who'd been cut, but The Reg has learned that the departed include individuals working on and around some of the company's highly touted open-source projects.

Among those gone are brains who worked on the OpenJDK, desktop Java, and the Java 2 Standard Edition (JavaSE) interface.

Also gone are individuals working in marketing and on social media who were trying to build a community around OpenSolaris, the open-source edition of Sun's Unix operating system.

News of the cuts will provide a brief respite for some at Sun, who've been living under a cloud of uncertainty. But more cuts are coming. Sun announced in November it would cut 6,000 of its 33,400 workforce, on top of between 1,500 and 2,000 cuts announced in May.

Sun said in a statement Thursday that the number of positions that are being eliminated "when combined with the other cost cutting measures and organizational changes being implemented, will put the company on track for improved financial performance." ®