Tuesday, February 25, 2003

Sun Microsystems Will Give Its Software to Students and Faculty Members Free By FLORENCE OLSEN Sun Microsystems is giving students and professors a free ride. The company announced on Monday that it would no longer charge them for nearly 100 software products, including programming tools. Excluded from the program are colleges' administrative offices. They will continue to pay the usual license fees. Students and faculty members will gain free access to many of Sun's Java programming tools, which are used to write programs that run on the Web. The portfolio of free products will include Solaris 9, which is Sun's proprietary version of the Unix operating system; StarOffice, which includes a word-processing program; and Sun One Studio, a suite of developer tools for Sun's Java platform. One analyst said the announcement was not surprising, considering colleges' increasing reliance on Linux software for teaching and their lessening interest in Microsoft's and Sun's software. "Education is incredibly important for both companies, primarily because education has been going heavily toward Linux, and Linux is free," said Rob Enderle, an analyst at Giga Information Group, a market-research company. The Linux operating system and programming tools are based on open-source code, which its voluntary developers worldwide make freely available for anyone to use and to modify. "Both Microsoft and Sun are trying to keep education from going to Linux, and from developing more programmers and potential customers for that platform," Mr. Enderle said. Sun Microsystems officials acknowledged that the company's free-licensing strategy is based on the fact that student innovation has created a market for products that have since been adopted by better-paying corporate customers, an assessment with which Mr. Enderle agreed. "The affinity that has been driving Linux into corporations has come from the new hires -- the people brought in from colleges and universities," he said, "very much like it was with Unix and with Microsoft software in years past." Sun officials said they hoped the new program would get more students and faculty members using Sun's Java platform, a set of Web programming tools that compete in the marketplace with Microsoft's Visual Studio.net tools, which are used to write applications for the Windows operating system and for the Web. Last week, Microsoft announced a $3.5-million program of grants aimed at making its programmer tools available to computer-science students. Sun's no-cost licensing program, which will affect education and research institutions worldwide, was valued by Sun as "very, very conservatively $1-billion," said Kim Jones, vice president for global education and research. The program includes free Web-based software training and quarterly software updates. "Students who really want to become familiar with what it takes to build out interesting projects -- for everything from next-generation gaming on handsets to more creative and innovative peer-to-peer applications -- now have access ubiquitously and without charge to all of that technology," said Jonathan Schwartz, executive vice president for software. Sun officials began the announcement with a joking reference to students' unwillingness to pay for software. "We want to make them feel a lot better about that," Mr. Schwartz said. Colleges and universities that are interested in the free licensing program should contact Ms. Jones by e-mail at kim.jones@sun.com, and they will be given instructions on how to download the software. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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