Rumors Of A Price For Sun’s Staroffice Are Only Rumors 

 This week we have received a number of emails from faithful subscribers who have noticed several articles in the press about the possibility that Sun may decide to charge for its StarOffice office suite.

We first surfaced this issue last year, in our December 21 issue, http://www.wohl.com/wa0178.htm. In that issue, we noted that Sun was considering charging for at least some version of StarOffice, largely because some corporate customers had expressed their concern that they could not use StarOffice as a corporate product if it was a free product.  At that time, Sun confirmed that such conversations were occurring, but that no decision had been made.

All of the current rumors can be traced to the same source, an article in an on-line German publication, Heise Online (in German), http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/db-24.02.02-000/.  It was picked up in the British publication The Register, http://www.theregus.com/content/4/24146.html, the next day, February 25^th.  Both publications seemed to think that Linux and Windows versions of StarOffice would be priced but that Solaris would remain free.  When ZDNet commented, however, on February 25, they got the same kinds of comments from Sun that we’ve summarized below.  http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104-844919.html.

Sun confirms that while discussions of pricing StarOffice, especially for corporate customers, have been underway for some time, no decision has been reached.  We spoke to Pat Sueltz on this subject during the Sun Analysts’ Conference on February 7. At that time, she mentioned that this largely was a matter of being able to provide support.  (Editorial Note:  Of course, you don’t have to price a product to price its support, as many Linux software vendors could tell you.)

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