Sun to Charge for Star Office 6.0

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.'"

Comments

-10 FUD on the MQR standard

[MarkusQ]

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