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Sun to Charge for Star Office 6.0

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the death-of-a-thousand-pinpricks dept.

biwillia writes: "According to this heise article (in German, or Google translated), free versions of Star Office will now only be available to Solaris users. Free versions for Linux and Windows users will no longer be offered. A homemade translation of the first paragraph reads, 'With version 6.0 of Star Office, scheduled to be released in May, Sun has changed the product politics of their Office package, which had been freely distributed since the aquisition of Hamburg-based Star Division. In the future, Sun wishes to charge license fees for usage of the Windows and Linux versions. Only the version for Sun's own operation system Solaris will remain free.'"

5 of 695 comments (clear)

  1. Remember .. by Eloquence · · Score: 1, Redundant

    .. OpenOffice is LGPL. StarOffice is the proprietary version of OpenOffice. Are there any differences between StarOffice and OpenOffice (applications)?

  2. Silly waste of resources... by TJPile · · Score: 0, Redundant

    So now people will begin using OpenOffice. Why did Sun decide on this? It's stupid, let the OpenSource community do most of the work for you, and THEN charge for it; don't waste your own resources to do it. They will NOT make enough money to keep that project viable. They're trying to pull an Apple. Give them good software for free, only available on your OS, and they will come. Sun maybe had a shot at this before pulling the plug on Intel Solaris development. Not now. Apple is the only company that seems to get away with things like that.

  3. And by Hangtime · · Score: 1, Redundant

    Exactly three people will be using the free version on Solaris and no one of the Linux and Windwos versions.

  4. From Sun to OpenOffice by crivens · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I presume people will switch from Sun to OpenOffice, once OpenOffice proves it itself, which hopefully won't be too far away.

  5. -10 FUD on the MQR standard by MarkusQ · · Score: 2, Redundant
    OpenOffice is unusable: as anyone subscribed to debian-openoffice@lists.debian.org knows, people have been trying to get it to build for well over a year, with no success (let alone being able to make a debian package out ot if).

    OpenOffice is the biggest "open source" scam that Sun has pulled to date. I would be tempted to put it in the same fiasco category as Netscape when the unbuildable source was first released to the public, but I just can't believe that Sun dosen't know any better, or that they wouldn't allocate developer resources to making it work.

    This is flat out FUD.

    -- MarkusQ