Santa Clara-based Sun Microsystems has never really had a strong lineup for the small-to-medium-business market. And with a stronger reliance upon open source, it's been difficult for Sun to compete in a field where someone else already has a corner on "free."

So during a low-key event at its San Francisco office yesterday, Sun held a Tech Chat to discuss how the company plans to earn real revenue from free and open source software, including in market segments where it hasn't yet made the dent it would like to: for instance, in the field of open source applications servers.

GlassFish is a community-based open source application server designed to be a "commercial-grade implementation" of Sun's Java Enterprise Edition (EE) 5 software. Built upon technologies provided by Sun and Oracle, the GlassFish community has more than 1,100 members who help search for and debug any problems with the GlassFish code, in one of the most popular examples of the open source community helping a company.

On the one hand, it's nice to have such a healthy community building off of Sun's platform. On the other, what room does that leave for Sun?

Sun's vice president of marketing, Mark Herring, offered an example that fairly described the vital differences between GlassFish and the Sun Java System Application Server. While it's certainly an option for SMBs to use GlassFish because it's available for free and has a vibrant community, corporations choose the Sun Application Server for a level of indemnification that simply cannot be reached using GlassFish.

At one point, Herring explained how using the Sun Application Server will allow companies with problems to call and receive tech support -- a new patch, tech support, or general help -- in a much faster time than relying on the GlassFish community. IT departments in larger corporations will oftentimes avoid open source software, for fear that a solid support structure would be unavailable if something breaks. For instance, Herrring said, a server could break and require a patch at midnight over the weekend, where Sun is much better suited to help a client over the GlassFish community.

User groups, training and registration for additional tips and tricks on how to properly implement its software are several other ways Sun hopes to monetize the use of FOSS by SMBs and larger corporations.

Sun hopes its latest SMB initiative will help persuade companies to take a chance on open source solutions, that may be worth the extra investment for the benefit of a reliable support structure in place.