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By Gavin Clarke
November 30, 2005
Sun Microsystems is giving away more software in another stab at building a "volume" business based on commanding market share among developers. Software developers can now download unsupported copies of Sun's Java Enterprise System (JES), SeeBeyond integration suite, C, C++ and Fortran tools, and N1 grid engine and systems management software, which are also being integrated with Solaris to create the Solaris Enterprise System (SES).
Sun is sacrificing revenue from both licensing of products like SeeBeyond and more than $100m in subscriptions derived from JES for income from services. Sun believes it can offset this with revenue from a raft of planned services, which will be charged on a per-user and per-hourly basis. Sun, though, was vague about what services it would offer - hinting some are already available internally while others could cover indemnification, warranty and bug fixes.
Additionally, Sun re-committed itself to open sourcing its entire software portfolio - a pledge it has been making for more than a year and slowly delivering. Sun believes it can build a volume market among developers for its software tools and runtimes, which it can then monetize at a later stage. This strategy, however, has not realized much success with Sun's past efforts to give away its application server and other pieces of middleware.
Among software to be open sourced will SeeBeyond's Integrated Composite Applications Network (ICAN), bought by Sun this summer. Sun, though, said it has yet to work thorough the licensing details, and refused to put a date on its release.
Source: The Register
Edited by x2p, 01 December 2005 - 05:31 PM.
