Sun Microsystems has come up with its own version of the certified LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software stack. It won't take you too long to spot the difference.

The company today announced Solaris + AMP, featuring Solaris 10 certified for interoperability with Apache, the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, and Perl, PHP and Python scripting languages. That's right, it's taking the all-important "L" of the LAMP stack beloved by Web 2.0 developers and marketing managers across Silicon Valley.

Sun claims its optimized binaries, which are available for free download, deliver a performance improvement of between 30 and 200 per cent over the standard binaries.

Solaris + AMP is also available with Sun's usual hardware stack under a 60-day free trial, with Sun Fire x64 servers, Sun Ultra Workstations and Sun Storage.

Sun is also targeting developers with its first offering based on the Open Solaris project, launched in January 2005. Solaris Express, Developer Edition features updates submitted to the Open Solaris community that have yet to make it into the supported version of Sun's operating system. These include drivers for NetBeans 5.5, Studio 11, the Gnome KDE desktop and 150 other open source applications.

Support for Solaris Express, Developer Edition is available under subscriptions announced in January of $49 per incident or annually at $249.

Oracle is also tinkering with LAMP, from a marketing perspective. The database giant has begun espousing OPAL, an acronym that conveniently dumps the competing MySQL element of LAMP - the "M" - and that handily inserts Oracle, in its place.

Dan Roberts, Sun's director of developer tools marketing, said Sun is competing vigorously with Oracle and IBM to grow its business. "We see base developer services as one way to bring people into a conversation with us that is not possible with anonymous downloads of tools. Once you get people into your chain it's easier to work with them and add value downstream," he said. ®

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