<p>The brouhaha surrounding Microsoft Corp.'s new volume licensing plans has apparently been good news for companies like Sun Microsystems Inc., which last week announced the beta release of its free StarOffice 6 office productivity suite.</p>
<p>Iyer Venkatesan, the product line manager for StarOffice, told eWEEK in an interview Tuesday that there had been more than 200,000 downloads of the software from Sun's Web site over the past week. Some two-thirds of those downloading the software had indicated on the download page that they were Windows users, he said.</p>