| Sun to sell StarOffice 6.0 for 'under $100' |
Mar. 19, 2002
[Updated 4:35pm PST] Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced its plan for the sale and distribution of the upcoming release of StarOffice 6.0. According to company officials, "StarOffice . . . will be provided at a nominal charge based on a tiered, per-user structure." An end-user retail package, which will include a CD and user manual, Web-based training, and a bundled support incident certificate will be priced at "under $100". Additionally, a special version for education market will be offered for the cost of the media (CDROM) plus shipping. Specific pricing will be announced when StarOffice 6.0 is available "in the coming months," the company said.
Sun will also offer services and support contracts for help-desk and end-user support, training, software upgrades and deployment and migration services, and will continue to distribute StarOffice 6.0 through agreements with hardware OEMs, Linux distributors, and software vendors. New Sun hardware, including SunRay appliances and Solaris workstations, will continue to come pre-installed with the StarOffice 6.0 software, once launched.
Mike Rogers, vice president and general manager of Sun's Desktop and Office Productivity Business Unit, told DesktopLinux.com that Sun plans to continue its offering of a no-charge download of the OpenOffice.org version of the application through the OpenOffice.org project. In addition, Rogers said Sun will fully support the ongoing community development process through OpenOffice.org. According to Rogers, Sun will continue to periodically release the open source code from StarOffice to the OpenOffice.org project, so that OpenOffice will continue to track StarOffice over time. There will, however, be some differences between the commercial and open source versions of the program. These differences, explained Rogers, will principally be due to the use of some proprietary software technologies and components within StarOffice for functions such as file filters, fonts, linguistic tools, etc. In many cases, OpenOffice will have open source equivalents for these, but in some cases there may be differences in functionality.
"It's clear that Sun is moving to a StarOffice business model that is sustainable for the long haul," said Dan Kusnetzky, IDC's vice president of system software research. "With this new structure in place, organizations of all sizes are certain to feel more comfortable knowing that the software will be commercially supported and will continue to evolve with the needs of the market."
StarOffice supports Linux, Solaris, and Windows platforms. Rogers said over 25 million copies of StarOffice have been downloaded from Sun's website.
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