The trunk

Surely you read a lot about new Sun’s marketing show.
Let’s go to the source of the news. Sun.com shows a big banner stating “Free and Open Source Software: Sun announces […blah…blah…] software with Solaris at no cost“.

Let’s forget for a moment that “free” that at the beginning could mean FOSS but in the end means “gratis” and therefore confuses who must still understand the difference.

I see the following scenarios:

• Think of you as a business company: whatever you think about free(dom) software, probably its cost is not a problem.
  Usually that money is part of the project budget.
  So you won’t be interested.
• Now think of you as a student who knows nothing about free(dom) software. You are probably used in using cracks and keygens to enable your illegal software copies. And you are proud of that.
  So you won’t be interested.
• Now think of you as a fellow. That software could be gratis, but it’s not free(dom). You already have similar softwares and they are free.
  So you won’t be interested.

So, now: where is Sun going? Who could be interested?
Let me say: I really think of Sun as one of the biggest friend of free(dom) software between large business companies.
But they are talking about money, not about features, nor about reliability, nor about interoperability, nor about extendability…

I really fear they hope to gain fame and respect from an inexistent community that uses its software just because it’s gratis, without even asking if it is free or not.
I really fear their huge investment will just be forgotten in a couple of months.
I really fear we’ll lose a friend and I hope I’m mistaken.