By Siobhan Kennedy
Sun Microsystems Inc will no longer charge developers for the source code to the standard edition of its Java application development kit, the company’s CEO Scott McNealy said yesterday. McNealy chose the end of his hour-long keynote on the first day of the Java Business Conference ’99 in New York to announce the news, which was greeted by applause from the packed auditorium. He said that Sun would eliminate the license fees for both the run-time environment and the binaries for the Java 2 Standard Platform Edition platform starting January 21. The fee for the testing compatibility kit will stay, but Sun is looking at ways to reduce the price, he said.
Giving away its software for free was one of the key themes McNealy came back to time and time again during his keynote. He made a great show of pointing to the fact that every attendee had been issued with a CD of Sun’s StarOffice applications suite product and encouraged users to load it on as many machines as possible, to give it away to friends and colleagues, and we won’t see you, he said.
I should have come out here in a Santa hat, he told the audience, with all that free stuff…we can’t afford Super Bowl ads. McNealy admitted that Sun stands to make no money through its Java licensing program, pointing to its core server and workstation platforms as the real moneyspinner. That’s how we’ll make our money, it’s not through Java licenses, it would be a cool model but we tried it and it doesn’t work anymore.
McNealy went on to push the virtues of software as a service. ‘That’s the new model, he said. Despite the $1.1bn in venture capital funding in the San Francisco Bay area a month, the CEO said he never saw any new shrink-wrapped software. Those start- ups, like Amazon.com and Hotmail before them, are developing new software and using it: But they’re not selling it, he said, adding that the web-based version of StarOffice, StarPortal, was designed to do exactly the same. You should be able to get StarPortal through your favorite service provider as of next summer, he said, adding that if any enterprise application was really important: You should not have it…because they don’t lose it, you do.
Of course, it’s not just adding software services to the network that McNealy’s interested in, he wants to make sure his hardware products get there too. We’re all too focused on getting people connected to the internet, when we should be thinking about connecting things…anything with a digital or electrical heartbeat is going to get connected. He added: In the enterprise, I think that’s the big moneymaker.
He also used the keynote to briefly demonstrate the company’s SunRay machines and the use of Java smart cards to authenticate user sessions.
