From John Schwartz's Blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/the_value_of_distribution_java"To put some data around its popularity, last week, we distributed more than 3,000,000 copies of OpenOffice 3. Downloads are accelerating, giving us a reachable user base we estimate to be between 150,000,000 and 200,000,000 users - a global recession will amplify OpenOffice adoption. And 100's of millions of users drive a lot of foot traffic. An auction's afoot (no pun intended) to see who we'll be partnering with us to integrate their businesses and brands into our binary product distribution - the possibilities are limitless: people tend to print those documents, fax them, copy them, project them (and I know this annoys my friends in the free software community, but branding allows us to invest more in OO.o community and features, from which everyone benefits)."
I felt this was important to bring to the attention of the Rant radio community. Would you like your software to service you up with ads for the opportunity to use the software? Really upset right now, Open office, Java and other software are being highjacked, so I can be plunged with more crappola advertising for things that really have no meaning to me.
It seems that Sun thinks its ok to monetize their only couple of decent products with advertisements and other things so that I might want my brain bombarded to buy more?
Before commenting, please go read the whole article, so you get a breath of what Sun, Google, Microsoft and a couple other companies are trying to do. This is similar to what Microsoft was planning to monetize its download and update service a bit ago in the news.
