Sun Microsystems president and COO Jonathan Schwartz on Thursday cited the company's plans to eventually offer all of its software for free as a way to build communities around its technologies.
"The net upside of that is we get more people engaged in our community," Schwartz said of Sun's plans while speaking at the AlwaysOn conference here.
Sun currently offers its Solaris operating system components freely via open source. Technologies such as Java also are downloadable at no charge.
"We've been trying to faithfully explore how to deliver our products and technologies for free," Schwartz said. He made no specific statement about offering Sun hardware for free, however. Sun can leverage its software technologies to boost hardware sales.
Other software products on Sun's roster include its Sun Java Enterprise System middleware, Sun Java Desktop System, the StarOffice office suite, and development tools such as Sun Java Studio Creator. The N1 datacenter management offerings and StorEdge storage software also are in Sun's arsenal.
There have been 2 million licenses downloaded for the open source version of Solaris, Schwartz said. Open source does not imply that there is no revenue to be generated but that different business models are used, he said.
Overall, Schwartz was praiseworthy of open source. "Open source is having a [highly] productive role in driving innovation, driving down cost," he said.
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