2 May 2002 Management changes have continued at systems and software vendor Sun Microsystems, with the announcement that the head of its Linux division has also left the company.

Stephen DeWitt, vice president and general manager for content delivery and edge computing at Sun, who joined the company following its acquisition of low-end Linux server appliance vendor Cobalt Networks in 2000, left the company last Friday, it has been learned.

The news follows the surprise announcement earlier this week that Sun’s number two in command, chief operating officer Ed Zander, was to step down. DeWitt was responsible for furthering the development of Sun products running on the open source Linux operating system.

Sun had planned to roll out a series of servers based on Linux later this year. Vivek Mehra, co-founder of Cobalt, will assume DeWitt’s role at Sun.

DeWitt is the seventh senior executive to announce their resignation in recent days. In late April, Sun’s chief financial officer Michael Lehmann and vice president of systems John Shoemaker both announced they would be leaving in July. In addition, Sun has announced the reorganisation of certain executive roles in both its hardware and software businesses.