Sun software - Does it make diddly?

Give it away, and some day they'll pay. Maybe

Comment With Sun Microsystems on the block - and perhaps on the chopping block - for the past several weeks, it is probably a good time to take a gander at the family jewels: Sun's software business.

Sun likes to count downloads and the size of installed bases because the company's top brass believes this a kind of leading indicator for future revenue streams for commercial support, professional services, and other stuff productized by the company. And with so many key products open sourced - including home grown products like Solaris, Zettabyte File System, and Java and Sun acquisitions like MySQL, VirtualBox, and OpenOffice -the company places equal importance on the size of the communities that help create and debug these programs.

The open source hit parade at Sun's Software Group goes something like this. Number one, of course, is the Java Runtime Environment (JRE). According to sources at Sun, the company tracks it on a monthly basis, and in the 31 days of March, there were 76.6 million updates or installs of the latest JRE, and 11.2 million of those were for completely new installs.

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