Sun Microsystems Inc. president and COO Jonathan Schwartz is one of corporate America's highest profile bloggers. But, he's not just giving his ideas away for free. He's giving the company's products away for free too.

He pointed to OpenOffice.org and Solaris as examples of Sun's move toward making all of its software open source. He then pointed to a number of examples that show how giving something away for free doesn't mean you can't make money.

*     Banks give checking away
*     Starbucks gives Wi-Fi access away
*     Cellular carriers give mobile phones away
*     American Express gives the Blue Card away

The common thread? All of these companies end up making money off their customers whether it's by selling services, subscriptions or coffee alongside the free service.

For Sun, it's giving products away for free to develop a community of users that builds products around Java and also to get customers to try its products without having to pay up front. "It's far easier to build a community around something that is free than something that costs $100,000."

And the revenue will come, said Schwartz. He pointed to the slew of games and entertainment applications built on the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition (J2ME),  that are being deployed on millions of mobile handsets around the world. While each game only costs $4 or $5, if you multiply that by the billions of cell phones where these games are being played, someone is making a lot of money. The question is: Will it be Sun?— Joshua Jaffe

alwayson2005

Read Barney Pell's account of Mark Cuban's talk yesterday
Go to The Deal's coverage of Sun's latest acquisition
Go to the AlwaysOn webcast

Video of Joshua Jaffe's interviews from the conference (Mouse over thumbnail images or double click to watch):