There's this old legal maxim that when you don't have the facts argue the law, when you don't have the law argue the facts, and when you don't have either pound on the table.

Sun is pounding on the table. (Watch the picture above move here, at NASA's Visualization Studio.)

Sun has abandoned its hardware uniqueness and gotten in bed with computing's lovable loser, Fujitsu. (That's proof they don't have the facts.) They've also said "me, too" to Bill Gates' audacious prediction that, very soon, hardware will be free. (There is the proof they haven't got the law.)

What have they got? Click below to find out.

What they've got on the facts is the flip side of Moore's Second Law, which holds that the cost to produce a new chip rises exponentially with its complexity. Sun must have allies if its SPARC design is to go anywhere, and such allies are increasingly hard to come by. Motorola has dropped out, IBM is going its own way. So how about the Japanese?

What they've got on the law is, quite simply, the biggest lie since "content wants to be free." Hardware wants to be free. But it doesn't. When hardware is free, people move toward the lowest-common denominator of hardware. Witness the cellular industry's big problem today, long contracts on stuff that will soon be obsolete, and which can't buy all the great new services that will soon be possible. It's maddening.

If hardware is free, even in the consumer space, people get crappy hardware. That's what the market says.

What is true is that, in the future, software will have to subsidize hardware in order to move the merchandise. That's not the same as free. In fact, it's a negative number (insofar as the software companies are concerned).

And it's also nonsense.

Because what Sun is talking about, free hardware, applies only in the client space. We might have free phones, free organizers, even free PCs, all subsidized by software and service revenue.

On the server side it's going to be different. Server hardware is not going to be free. The hardware that goes into the network is going to cost plenty, and it's going to be worth plenty. Not just the computing hardware, but the communications hardware.

You'll buy server hardware to create services, and give away client hardware to sell services. Software and services will pay the bills from now on. What will matter will be what the thing does, not what it is.

But that's not the same thing as saying "hardware is free." Hardware is free, in fact, is just a silly slogan. It's classic table-pounding.

Sun rise, Sun set.
Sun rise, Sun set.
Swiftly fly the years.

Time sure flew while Scott McNealy was having fun. But it's time to go now.