Sun Microsystems is to drop its free downloads of StarOffice 5.2 on Wednesday night, as it ramps up promotional efforts around the fee-based StarOffice 6.0, the company said. In the meantime, Sun and Ximian announced a distribution deal bundling StarOffice 6.0 with fee-based Ximian products. Sun's manoeuvres with StarOffice are being closely watched as open-source software businesses continue to search for ways to boost revenues. Paid, proprietary software is controversial in the open-source world, which is based on the theory that profits can be made on "free" products, but some open-source companies say it is the only way to continue to fund themselves.

The decision completes the transition of the StarOffice suite back to being a paid product, as it was when Sun bought the software along with its maker, Germany's Star Division, in 1999. Sun showed its intent to make StarOffice into a serious competitor for Microsoft Office when it first began giving away StarOffice 5.2 and then, in 2000, donated the StarOffice 5.2 source code to open-source developers.