Sun Microsystems will give away its StarOffice software to ministries of education in Europe and Africa, the company is expected to announce Tuesday, in an effort to undermine rival Microsoft.
"Sun is committed to giving the global education community access to the StarOffice productivity suite at no cost," Kim Jones, vice president of global education and research, said in a statement. If each copy of the software were purchased separately, the value of the deal would be more than $5.7 billion, Sun plans to announce.
Sun in March donated StarOffice to China's ministry of education earlier this year. That deal, plus similar ones with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Chile, meant that about 200 million students could use StarOffice, Sun said. The new deals could add about 24 million students to the total.
Office software isn't Sun's only attack on Microsoft. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company also is embarking on a mission to spread the use of the Linux operating system. The company is expected to detail that effort Wednesday at its SunNetwork 2002 conference in San Francisco. StarOffice runs on Linux as well as Windows and Sun's Solaris operating system. Price tags associated with donated software can be misleading because it costs a company little to reproduce thousands of copies of the programs. The difference between the retail and actual cost of software was a big part of criticism of a proposed settlement of some of Microsoft's antitrust case.
News source: ZDNet
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