Sun Microsystems, the Silicon Valley-based hardware giant, announced last week that it was purchasing Star Division, a California software publisher. Now that, by itself, may not be hot news. What is hot is that Sun has also announced that it will give away Star''s flagship product, Star Office, for free over the Internet.

This product lines up against Microsoft’s Office 2000 suite (which is priced at about $480 or Rs.15,500). Star Office comes with a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a database program, a calendar, an e-mail program, and a Web browser. It is Java-enabled, and therefore platform independent, runs on Linux, Windows NT and Solaris. It needs less than 100 MB of disk space and can also handle file formats from other formats like Office, Corel and Lotus.

Sun said that it was making this move to further stimulate the growth of the Internet. The argument is that if more high-quality software is available online, more people will use the Internet, which in turn will force more service providers to upgrade their systems.

Incidentally, Sun servers are the most preferred and popular Internet servers. "It''s all part of our vision of open network computing," said Scott McNealy, chairman and CEO of Sun Microsystems.

However, industry watchers see Sun''s move as yet another chapter in the ongoing rivalry between Sun and Microsoft. In the marketplace, Microsoft’s Office is the market leader, and way ahead of Star. Microsoft gets 40 per cent of its revenues through Microsoft Office while for Sun there is very little coming in from desktop application programs and software in general. Sun does not stand to lose anything by giving away Office free but could make dents in Microsoft''s market share and cash cow product.

Users feel that the programs in the Star suite are not as good as their Microsoft counterparts or other standard applications for those functions, but most are good enough for the typical Office user, especially if they are available free.

Another major plus for Star Office is that it works on the free Linux operating system, as well as on Sun''s Solaris. This feature is expected to give a big boost to Linux since there are not too many Microsoft-compatible productivity applications on that platform.

Star Office is available for free download from - www.sun.com/products/staroffice/