In moving to cut its current workforce by , Sun is trying to stay ahead of a falling knife. And made it clear that Sun officials are banking on the company's open-source strategy to help it pull through.

Sun finished its fiscal , which ended in September, with a US$1.7 billion loss on $3 billion in revenue, down 7.1% from the same period last year. The company needs to boost its sales at the same time that the growth of worldwide IT spending .

But in the current , "it will be difficult to depend on increasing sales," said , an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif. "The only way the company will achieve profitability of any sort is to deeply slash expenses. And the easiest way to achieve that goal is to start laying off people."

Nonetheless, contended that the economic downturn will work to his company's advantage and vindicate its open-source moves, which include the release of the operating system and the earlier this year of database vendor .

"We are preconfigured for the downturn," Schwartz said in with Computerworld last month. He claimed that users will be more inclined to try open-source products such as MySQL, and Sun's GlassFish application server during a time of economic stress.