UNIXR consultant Paul Murphy tackled the question of what sense it makes for Sun to give away product as it does with the SolarisTM Operating System (Solaris OS). His ZDNet.com blog is entitled Who owns Solaris?.

Murphy notes the irony in the history of UNIX, where companies such as IBM, DEC, Red Hat, Microsoft and AT&T, which typically charged more for the solution than other companies such as Sun, HP, NCR, Honeywell/Bull, also did considerably less for development of the solution than those enterprises whose pricing policies were more generous.

He suggests that Sun's practice of giving away Solaris OS licenses and then adding on support for which customers are charged is more straightforward than Microsoft's practice of selling "free" Windows upgrades, given that the charges are known at the outset.

Sun makes money with this model, Murphy explains, because "...Java's value (suitability to the purpose) combined with near zero cost for vendors lets them achieve unit volumes in the hundreds of millions - which then drives demand for products and services both from Sun and from the huge number of smaller businesses comprising the third-party Java ecosystem."

This practice resembles Ken Thompson's sending a free UNIX tape to a Berkeley colleague, resulting in both instances in building volume and customer commitment, encouraging adoption of new ideas and the identification of bad ideas while building community through the creation of markets for secondary products and services, Murphy asserts.

And, as more members of the open source community contribute to the improvement of a solution, the greater its appeal to new users and its utility to those who have already adopted the solution. "Sun's continuing investment in Solaris is about building short term volume by providing long term value," Murphy concludes. [...read more...]

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