Slashdot Mirror
Sun May GPL StarOffice
Lennie writes: "To my surprise I read here: 'Sun Microsystems is expected to announce this week that it will make StarOffice available as open source. Sun plans to release the suite under the GNU General Public License, which is promoted by the Free Software Foundation and is considered by many to be the purest of the open source licenses.'" Despite its reputation as bloatware, semi-free software and as the tack that Sun sets out for Microsoft, StarOffice is probably the suite that has done the most to allow migration from various MS applications, and free is a nice prelude to Free. If Star Office is GPL'd, it could have great trickle-down effects on AbiWord and other Linux office software.
I have speculated for a long time about what might happen if someone decided to take an existing, mature office suite and make it truly Open Source.
I haven't exactly been sitting on the edge of my seat. It has seemed likely that someone would do it eventually, but the event has just never seemed very imminent. It's clear that Microsoft, with 95% market share and over 10B annual revenues, has no incentive to make their suite Open Source. Corel has far too little clue, and IBM/Lotus have far too much.
The only glimmer of hope has been Sun, which seems to have a practice of being smart during the even-numbered years and downright silly during the odd-numbered ones.
An Open Source version of StarOffice would open up a remarkable number of opportunities. In the hope that this rumor is revealed to be true, I would like to applaud all of those people at Sun who contributed to the execution of this bold, visionary decision.
And frankly, I'm insulted that none of those people called me. :-) Granted, I doubt that our little 28-person company is even a blip on their radar screen. However, as founder of the AbiWord project, SourceGear has a lot of experience in the world StarOffice is about to join. In fact, I daresay that there is no one else on earth who knows more about losing money on Open Source office apps than I do. :-)
I think that the response from the Open Source community is an important opportunity, and I would like to offer my unsolicited advice regarding the appropriate tenor of our response:
The point is that Sun is making the only decision which will allow StarOffice to become better. It's never about where you are -- it's about where you are going.
For example, I'm fairly sure that StarOffice is built upon a Win32 compatibility library from Bristol. They can't GPL that. The spell checker is probably not theirs. In fact, most full-featured office suites today are built using a bunch of third-party components. If the first source code tarball from Sun is even buildable, I'll be surprised.
But I won't be complaining about it. Doing so is not going to benefit anyone.
Even in an Open Source world, there is room for multiple efforts. Many of the people who work on AbiWord or Gnumeric are doing so for the enjoyment or experience. StarOffice will meet different needs, and there is nothing preventing both projects from reaching their goals. In fact, the existence of StarOffice is more likely to benefit AbiWord and Gnumeric than it is likely to cause harm.
There was a recent published interview with someone from the Kylix team at Borlaprise. This guy gets it. He said things like, "Our success does not require Microsoft's failure", and, "When television came along, radio didn't suddenly go away."
It is possible that this GPL release of StarOffice will eventually cause some impact to the proprietary players. However, we need to speak not in terms of extinction or annihilation, but in terms of reduction of margins.
And we need to give it time before the effects start to be visible. Microsoft's product manager for Office is not scared, and [s]he doesn't need to be.
-- Eric W. Sink
Eric Sink
Software Craftsman
It is offically unimportant to people how bad or crappy a program is as long as it's GPL'd..
Exactly. You have just stated the GNU Manifesto For Dummies (tm). That's because if you don't like the way a GPL'ed program works, you can fix it. And even if you can't, somebody else will conceivably get so pissed off with it that they fix it and let you piggyback. Not so with closed source.
Some other company who realizes that their product is dead and decides to GPL it, would they get big time headlines?
That would depend on the relevance of the product, or rather the nature of the product. A fairly full-featured office suite being GPL'ed is certainly news. YAArkanoidClone probably isn't.
One last thing, is the GPL really considered to be the free-est license around? I am not expert or even that informed, but I was understand that the BSD license took that title??
Both place restrictions on the way the source can be used after opening; that's why they're licenses, after all. The GPL allows the original author to say, "Take this stuff, play around with it, but remember to share afterwards". Since the resulting changes are therefore available to all, the GPL is more free in an utilitarian sense.
Back in my day, we didn't have integrated office applications. If we wanted to plot some data, we wrote a fortran algorithm that created a graph. If we wanted to type a paper, we used LaTeX. Our integrated office suite was VI along with all of the associated compilers.
Nowadays, all these wishy-washy office types think that they need a bloated graphical office suite. I think they need to get off there innovative lazy butts and learn VI. Then they will be productive!
-vax computer, vi, lynx. 'nuf said
StarOffice has not gained significant acceptance because it is a BEAST to run. The thing slows to a crawl on my 64mb P3-400 laptop and results in nearly constant disk swapping. This is because, among other things, StarOffice implements its own Window manager, widget toolkit, etc. The first thing that StarOffice needs to do, if GPL'd, would be to tear out that annoying Win98-clone WM and implement it using standard gtk or Qt API calls. StarOffice is an incredibly mature and featureful product that, in spite of its performance issues, has proven pretty stable. Lack of a competent Office suite for Linux has proven one of the last barriers to mainstream acceptance, and SO is in a good position to erase that. But all of that is a moot point if no one can run it.
--
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
> If Star Office is GPL'd, it could have great trickle-down effects on AbiWord and other Linux office software.
Why does the OS community always think of commercial companies opening their software in terms of 'take, take, take?'
I've seen it with Apple, Darwin and OS X first-hand. Apple releases a BSD-license OS and immediately, Slashdot shouts "They should Open Source the Mac OS so we can take X and Y!" Now, Sun decides to GPL StarOffice and the Slashdot comments 'maybe this will help [insert competing OS Office Suite here]'
Maybe the other office suites will improve as a result. I hope so. However, the Open Source community consistently projects the attitude that Free software from corporations presents nothing but a feeding ground for carrion birds.
Why can't you improve StarOffice itself? Why do you flaunt your open hostility to commercial ventures that have chosen to support you?
Of course, the OS community thrives on sharing code, and I'm not criticizing that aspect. I am criticizing its tendency to follow, not lead: How many projects announced on Freshmeat or hosted on SourceForge exist as 'Free' alternatives to already existing proprietary software? Does the OS community all act like buzzards, picking the good meat from commercial open source ventures and leaving the bones when they finish?
I read several of the Darwin development lists and I see that there are a significant number of people who actually do contribute to Apple's open source efforts. The majority of you, however, think only in terms of raiding and pillaging, out of some staunch anticommercialism, even when the company supports your cause.
The Open Source Community will never lead as long as it continues to follow. Shining lights do exist, but the vast majority of Open Source software owes its existence to someone else's innovation, someone else's creative process, and someone else's hard work to develop the idea originally.
Realize that a much more innovative atmosphere can exist when you spend your time exploring new ideas and ways to improve the software that go beyond other's ideas, than when you spend your time stealing ideas and code from the next new OS project to come from Sun.
"1. Sun is now admitting that the idea of giving away a free office suite is non-viable and they are opening the source as a way to divest their engineering resources. Don't expect help from Sun in this area."
It is likely true that they see they can gain engineering resources that they wouldn't otherwise have because of usage of the GPL. Whether or not Sun will help, remains to be seen.
"2. Cross-platform support will die. Open Source projects of significant magnitude just don't happen on the major GUI OSes. StarOffice for Windows will lag far enough behind StarOffice for Linux that it won't be the cross-platform solution that it is touted as today."
Hmm.. you mean - like Mozilla, Crystal Space, GCC, and Abiword? These are all cross platform, and all major projects, the non Unix versions may sometimes lag in the features, but they tend to propogate to all of the differnt platforms with significant speed.
"3. This might even spell the death of StarOffice. GPL has produces a whole bunch of useful code, but the inevitable branching of the project will kill the corporate acceptability of StarOffice. Branching has proven inevitable on all but the simplest of projects."
Yes projects do fork, but there tend to be major official branches, and if support is offered for a specific branch, that is the one that the suits will go with. Also, forks can, and often do remerge. Whether forking is corporately acceptable, remains to be seen.
"4. If all that's not enough, GPL'd projects don't generally produce good end user software in terms of UI. Granted StarOffice pretty well sucks now in this regard, GPL won't help."
That is a traditional failing, one that is being addressed in both KDE and Gnome. Traditional Unix/Linux GUI's were difficult to make and modify, and handrolled by each new programming needing a GUI. With programs like Glade, good GUI design and prototyping become much easier and consistant. Thus we are likely to see Linux apps become more user freindly and usable as things progress.
LetterRip
I share your concerns, but I think you may be overly pessimistic. Here are a few of my thoughts on the same subjects:
:-)
>1. Sun is now admitting that the idea of giving
>away a free office suite is non-viable and they
>are opening the source as a way to divest their
>engineering resources. Don't expect help from Sun
>in this area.
Giving away a free office suite was not gaining them much in the way of hardware sales, which doesn't do Sun a lot of financial good. I don't think that was ever the reason they did it -- I think they did it to annoy Gates. This move should annoy Gates even more -- thousands of programmers working on a GPL office suite that is fairly mature has to be scary for MS. MS Office is their Killer App. -- the only other thing they have is Exchange, which is facing increasing competition from Domino and OpenMail.
The UI sucks. It made sense to take over the desktop some years ago, but let's face it the desktop is becoming homogenized pretty fast. The heavy interface is no longer necessary.
Maybe Sun wants to divest their engineering resources -- have them go work on Java, XML, Solaris, whatever. That's ok. I bet the people most familiar with the design will continue guiding and contributing to the open side.
>2. Cross-platform support will die. Open Source
>projects of significant magnitude just don't
>happen on the major GUI OSes. StarOffice for
>Windows will lag far enough behind StarOffice for
>Linux that it won't be the cross-platform
>solution that it is touted as today.
Tell you the truth, I think the cross platform support will increase. XFree and Gnome have spread far beyond the X86 platform at this point. If the basic UI of SO gets fixed, and Gnomified, this could be a cross-platform bonanza, at least on the free side. Perhaps somene will use one of the free crossplatform toolkits (like wxWindows) to do the platform dependent work. That would keep things stable.
In all honesty, I don't think a lot of places would seriously consider using SO on a windows machine if thay already had Office. But I do think a lot of places might consider running SO on Linux if the whole ASP/online registration thing continues.
I don't think people realize, the way Bill Gates realizes, that internet software could become like the video store -- your company uses MS Office for $.50 cents an hour, etc., and you get "popups" for security patches, upgrades, etc. that prompt for your credit card number -- Net connection required to even use the S/W. I suspect a lot of companies will switch entirely to Linux and SO when this stuff hits the 'net.
Sensitive parts of the government will have to switch to something standalone to do their work, for example. I don't know of any security model that would let someone do analyses on advanced military aircraft or nuclear weaponry over an ASP based web app model. The security people just can't allow that.
>3. This might even spell the death of StarOffice.
>GPL has produces a whole bunch of useful code,
>but the inevitable branching of the project will
>kill the corporate acceptability of StarOffice.
>Branching has proven inevitable on all but the
>simplest of projects.
Funny, I know of only a couple small projects that have branched, and they only branched because the Author wouldn't accept patches or didn't like the mods. In one case, the Author stopped working on the project, refused to answer emails about bugs, and took the GPL code off his webpage. Someone else took over, on a new webpage, and the original author started screaming "branch!" -- but that's not really a branch, IMHO.
If you mean that GPLing SO will make Sun lose control of SO, I agree. But I see no reason for it to branch that heavily. There are no Gimp branches, for example. This was always a behind-the-scenes project for Sun, it's not that big of a deal.
>4. If all that's not enough, GPL'd projects don't
>generally produce good end user software in terms
>of UI. Granted StarOffice pretty well sucks now
>in this regard, GPL won't help.
We had a 400 pg. Word document at work that was BSOD'ing NT on a P3/500/128 mb. machine. I was able to load and scroll fwd. and backward through the document with SO on a P1/200/32 mb. box using SO. Mangement still wouldn't let us use SO -- and I admit some of the formatting was wrong.
Gnome and KDE seem to be decent user interface software, and both are GPL'd. Both are improving rather strongly, I'd say. Some of the g[fill in the blank] programs -- gphoto, gimp, gnumeric, etc. -- don't have bad UI's at all. gimp could use some work
I've never throught the SO interface was "bad" -- at least not at the level of the child apps. The MDI thing that wraps all the child apps has to go! Only a few people I know actually like that.
I think GPL will help the UI. I just bet that within a few releases of a GPL'd SO, the root interface will be completely redone.
>Assuming Sun goes forward with GPLing StarOffice,
>we can all pretty much stop watching it.
...and start using it.
>Just my controvertial $.02.
...your $.02 has been "controvertally" raised to $.04.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I hope this doesn't happen to Star Office. It's needed.
The Open Source Community will never lead as long as it continues to follow.
Being the most innovative kid on the block may look good on the resume, but it only really matters in a world of restrictive intellectual property laws. The whole point of free software is to demolish IP boundaries so that the collective creativity and intelligence of the world's developers and users can be pooled to the benefit of all without being hindered by proprietary restrictions. If the free software community did nothing but plunder the work of other people and use it to build the cheapest, most flexible, easiest-to-use, and most reliable software around and did it without coming up with one idea of its own, well, mission accomplished.
Anyone who wants to get into a pissing match with Sun, MS, or whomever about creativity and innovation is certainly free to do so, but the main purpose of both the Free and Open Source software communities is the sharing of knowledge. Hot-dogging is a personal imperative, and really irrelevant to the world at large.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.