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John Cox, Boston

Sun Microsystems next week is expected to unveil a startling new feature for its StarOffice Suite of office applications: a price.

Until now, StarOffice had been available as a free download or with a nominal price to cover manuals and media. In March, Sun announced that StarOffice 6.0 would for the first time carry an unspecified price tag. Sun has said the final retail cost will be under $US100 per user.

Version 6.0, besides having an array of new features, also will be sold with end-user support, training, and software upgrade services. Various retail channels, including online vendors, will sell StarOffice. The retail package will include a CD, user manual, and web-based training course, and will run on Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Sun's own Solaris operating systems.

A free, but unsupported version will still be available via OpenOffice.org, which is a Sun-founded organization to oversee the public, open-source development of StarOffice. Sun executives have pledged to work closely with the OpenOffice community, and to write code changes directly into the OpenOffice code base.

OPTIMISTIC AND OPEN
Sun officials have disclosed that the new release will have a wide array of bug fixes and will integrate some third-party products, such as file format filters, and internationalisation code for non-English users.

One key part of Version 6.0 is an open XML file format that will underlie StarOffice documents. Sun is promoting the format as an open standard that can, and should, replace the de facto standard format created by Microsoft Office.

The 'no-fee' strategy had been adopted by Sun in 1999, when it acquired the software from a German company, Star Division, in an attempt to create a web-based group of "thin client" office applications that could challenge Microsoft's overwhelmingly dominant Microsoft Office suite. About a year later, Sun released the source code under an open-source license via OpenOffice.org.

The night's sleep of Microsoft Office executives remained undisturbed.

Sun officials continue to insist that StarOffice has "momentum" in the market: Sun says it received one million download requests for the upcoming Version 6.0 in just the past three months. The current release is 5.2 and includes applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and data management.

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