Sun hits Europe with $5.7bn StarOffice giveaway

Sun Microsystems will give away its StarOffice software to ministries of education in Europe and Africa in an effort to undermine rival Microsoft. An official announcement is expected later today.

"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 $5.7bn, Sun plans to announce.

Sun donated StarOffice to China's ministry of education earlier this year. That deal, plus similar ones with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Chile, meant about 200 million students could use StarOffice, Sun said. The new deals to be announced Tuesday will add about 24 million potential students to the total.

However, the company has yet to announce which major corporations are using StarOffice.

The move is geared to undermine the power of Sun arch-enemy Microsoft, which dominates the market for word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software with its Microsoft Office product.

Sun hasn't done much to dent Microsoft's market share or make money on StarOffice. But it still can consider the erosion of Microsoft revenue and customer base a victory.

Office software isn't Sun's only attack on Microsoft. The company also is embarking on a mission to spread the use of the Linux operating system. The company is expected to detail that effort on 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, though, 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 legal case.

Stephen Shankland writes for News.com