Sun Microsystems is moving its StarOffice productivity suite to a business model that is more sustainable for the long haul. The soon-to-be-released StarOffice 6.0 will be bundled with value-add support and service and be charged on a tiered, per-user-based structure.
However, in support of the on-going community development process of StarOffice through OpenOffice.org (www. openoffice.org), developers will still be able take advantage of the latest OpenOffice.org versions of the suite at no charge.
"Through the StarOffice 6.0 beta program, we gained valuable customer feedback saying they would prefer to pay for product that was bundled with our support and services," explains Stefano Mattiello, managing director of Sun Microsystem SA.
"Our enhanced product and support offering will meet these needs." To date StarOffice has been downloaded more than six million times and has tens of millions of users. In the past three months alone, one million users downloaded the beta version of StarOffice 6.0.
Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software research at IDC, comments: "It's clear that Sun is moving to a StarOffice business model that is sustainable for the long haul. With this new structure in place, organisations of all sizes will feel more comfortable knowing that the software will be commercially supported and continue to evolve to the needs of the market."
Sun will now provide services and support contracts for help desk and end-user support, training and software upgrades for StarOffice.
StarOffice 6.0 will also be distributed through agreements with hardware, OEMs (original equipment manufacturers), Linux distributors and software vendors.
"The suite will also be pre-installed in new Sun hardware such as SunRay appliances and Solaris workstations," says Mattiello.
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