Slashdot Mirror
Star Office to be Community Sourced, confirmed
rwest writes "The latest from news.com, an article Sun to offer Microsoft Office competitor for free. The interesting bit is about half way through, where Brian Croll, a marketing director in Sun's platforms and software group says that "In addition to giving the software away for free, Sun will make the original programming instructions, or 'source code', available under the Sun Community Source License".
" This comes after yesterday's speculation about whether or not this would be open sourced.Update: 08/31 02:45 by H :NY Times also has an piece talking about the creation of Star Office as a Web app.
Apples and oranges. Netscape release a pile of largely useless source code, which wouldn't even compile. It is only now, over a year later, that it is even beginning to approach some semblance of usability. That is not the kind of project that is likely to attract developers or users.
StarOffice, on the other hand, is already pretty solid, and Sun probably wouldn't need to remove much code before releasing the source code.
My point is that since they're releasing under the SCSL, they're basically conceding that they're not going to make money from StarOffice. So, since they've already decided that, they might as well go ahead and Open Source(tm) it, to gain the additional benefit of wide distribution.
There's just no point in doing it half way.
Either way, I've (actually my company) already paid for my copy of StarOffice, so it's not going to affect me personally.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
While I don't think Sun is perfect, I doubt that they have the curious combination of utter ruthlessness and rotten-quality products that's made MS so hated. We might fight them anyway out of principle, but I suspect it will be more of a friendly fight. At least that's my hope.
D
----
Is it a coincidence that today the share price of Sun Microsystems went up while Applix and Corel went down? News.Com noticed stock price changes on opened-source Star day.
The Novell comparison really isn't fair. WordPerfect Office always was and still is considered a very competitive product with Microsoft.
The short story is that Novell screwed themselves over by forgetting to ship a product that supported TCP/IP until 1998. One can hardly blame WordPerfect for that. The long story involves their bumbling with System V UNIX and tendancy towards meglomanical delusions. (Well, maybe the Sun comparison is not that far off...)
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Even though it might not do exactly what we want it to do, let's look at what it may otherwise accomplish.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICT, the license does allow you to use the product, even commercially, free of charge (as long as you don't use more than 500 copies, if the picoJava rules apply to this).
In the past, StarOffice was free to use for non-commercial use, but you had to pay if you wanted to use it legitimately for work (my company bought it for me, $169, not bad, really). This meant that there was insufficient incentive to migrate from Microsoft Office.
Free, however, is a nice price...especially when you have 10, 20, 100 people using Office. This could definitely put the hurt on Microsoft by "cutting off their air supply," since Office is their cash cow.
Normally, this would be a bad thing; however, right now, with the desktop monopoly Microsoft holds, anything that reintroduces competition into the desktop market is a Good Thing, IMO.
Perhaps Microsoft will now get a taste of what they did to Netscape.
Maybe in a few years, AOL will buy them, too. He he he.
I'd still like to see Sun reconsider, and offer StarOffice under a GPL-, X11-, or MPL/QPL-type license.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
AFAI understood, the SUN-s licence is very nice for SUN, but unpleasant for everybody else as it basically says:
"We have published this programs source so You can work on it and make it better, but if we ever change our minds we may revoke the licence anytime. In particularly, you aren`t allowed to use the code or parts thereof for other projects."
I must say that I prefered the old Star-Office licence, since it was a straight commercial licence with "free for private use" attached to it, which was very easy to understand. SUNs "would-be-free" licence is much worse, since it camouflages itself as beeing much more than it really is.
As it is, SUN may hurt M$ (not so bad), kill Corel and Applix (bad- less choices left) and diminish the level of interest for various free-office projects in the next few years. It may also lead to various problems if someone starts writing the GPL-ed word-filters (for word) which are actually based on the filters from the Star-Office. I hope I am wrong.
My confidence in SUN would be much bigger if they would GPL the input and output filters - They may keep the rest of the program under any licence they like AFAI am concerned.
Solid or not, StarOffice is huge. It takes a considerable amount of effort to study source code of this magnitude. How many open source developers are willing to do it, before they're able to code even a tiny little feature in this suite. My guess is not many.
OTOH, StarOffice might be a model piece of software, extremely modular with clean interfaces that allow you to contribute by only studying one part of the software. But unfortunately, I doubt very much that StarOffice is such a piece of software.
Seems to me 95% of open source software developers want to get right into hacking code, and any amount of studying they'd need to do before getting to that phase, is just going to turn them off the project, be it licensed under Netscape, Sun or whatever license.
IMHO.
They aren't OPEN sourcing it, they are giving it the boneheaded license they've used for their other "no where to go but into the ground" projects. Who wants to work for free to increase Sun's profit margins? The use of the term "community" in the license is laughable.
I'm especially worried because the New York Times story about the purchase indicates that Sun intends to use this as a way of pushing their silly thin client plans. Word processing over the web! Gack.
If they really want to kill Microsoft, they should just open source StarOffice FOR REAL and support development. The benefits would be astounding. Sun, of course, will never do this.
This is the same company that buldozed System V into the offices of users who wanted to stick to BSD, who unbundled their compilers from their OS, etc. They don't ever back down when they make a mistake.
If that's true, why did Sun pay over half a billion dollars for the company?
That seems like a lot for a project that appears to be as revenue-free as they come. Not that they shouldn't have bought it - the price just seems amazingly high.
D
----
The thin client model is for the enterprise... For a company with 2000 end users in a building where everyone pretty much only uses an office application, email, and groupware, do you really need a PC where a lot of things can mess up or go wrong? A cheap thin client with no moving parts can save companies tons of money in support.
The paragraph you quoted did say that work on all new versions of Star Office will continue, including Linux and Windows versions.
As for office applications on the web, if you rarely use spreadsheets or presentations, why should you install a few hundred meg on your hard drive, if you could create something on a web page, save it/print it locally? If you use it all the time, then yeah it'd probably be better to have it on your hard drive, but for the occasional user, something web based would be perfectly sufficient.
Indeed they would. However, we need to look at what is tying the users to Windows: it is largely Microsoft Office (yes, games are important, but individual games have significantly less staying power than Office, and are presumably not used heavily in offices).
If RedHat, Caldera, and the rest (apart from Corel, naturally) bundle StarOffice (I don't know if RedHat or Debian's policies allow this, given the SCSL), you suddenly have a relatively easy to use office platform that has software licensing fess of $0. Windows is no longer a "must have" under circumstances like this.
So, let's see: Microsoft's solution for a 20-seat office is, oh, $5000 (at least; that's assuming no NT server, no Exchange, etc.). This, combined with Linux, costs roughly $0. Gee, tough decision, especially given StarOffice's compatibility with Microsoft Office file formats, and relative operational similarity (read: trivial training costs).
This is IE vs. Netscape all over again, except the revenue is larger, and it's happening to Microsoft this time.
C'mon, you must know as well as I do, that IS people all over the world are just looking for an excuse to introduce Linux on the desktop. They're tired of having to deal with Microsoft's crap, and are just bored with it all. This gives them a solid piece of ammunition that they can use to argue for Linux/UNIX on the desktop.
This in itself might not accomplish that, but a very large piece of the puzzle just got put into place.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
That's very disappointing; I was afraid there was some commercial distribution catch. I understand that Sun wants to recoup their investment, but...
If they stick to this type of licensing, StarOffice will remain a relatively insignificant piece of software. If they Open Source(tm) it, it could change the face of desktop computing, and could generate more hardware sales for Sun than they can ever hope to make from distribution fees.
I really hope ESR and Bruce Perens can have a chat with Sun, and talk some sense into them.
--
Interested in XFMail? New XFMail home page
"But," you cry with despair, "what about the BSD compiler they used to ship?" Ahem. It wasn't really a very good compiler, was it? It was buggy, non-optimized, and non-ANSIfied. This was the same compiler GNU zealots would look down their nose at as they ran to grab the latest version of gcc (note to those playing at home: do not try looking down one's nose while running. Leave this to the experts.)
So, yes, life would've been just peachy if Sun had included a compiler in their SVR4 port. But it's hardly an ass-raping for them not to have done so. Just get the gcc compiler you were probably using with SunOS anyway and get over it. You don't need a compiler to build gcc; get a prebuilt one, then rebuild it if you're so inclined.
And no, really, most Sun users don't need a C compiler. You need one; I need one. Developers need one. Sysadmins need one. SAP-boy over there doesn't need one, nor does Ms. EDA. Sun has one they work on, and charge for it. You and I can choose not to buy it. OSS and capitalism are not mutually exclusive; they live and breathe in the same space, and people get to choose which they like. Bold prediction: neither one will kill the other. Ain't it grand?
"At the core," Sun is like MS in that they're both for-profit corporations, but this is like saying that Ed Sullivan was like Ed Gein in that they were both carbon-based life forms: there's a lot of room in that definition. Read "The Microsoft Files" and see if there's anything Sun's done that even compares to Redmond's business as usual.
Second, commercial use is defined as use for "direct or indirect commercial or strategic gain or advantage."
How about a button on the desktop or command in your help manual that says "type this to install"? Would these breach it? It would basically be the same as them downloading it. It might be splitting hairs and bending licences, but thats a lot of what the software business is about, just ask M$.
If you can't I don't see this ever gaining a large scale audience and basically being of no use to the OSS movement in general and home users in particular. I'm talk about the "mom" type home user of course.
(No, I haven't studied the license, and I guess siccing some lawyers on it before going ahead is a given. (insert mult-page rant about too many laws and lawyers here))
+&x
Will be at : http://www.sun.com/staroffice
Here's a link to the Sun Community Source License, in case (like me) you're not sure of exactly what that means...
cheers,
Tim
Dell certainly makes little mention of this in current advertising, especially in magazine ads. However, I think you'll see this change in the near future
But since rumor has it that Linux will be available on PowerEdge servers and preloaded on the OptiPlex line as well (possibly not soon on Dimension, as the components tend to be more bleeding edge and often less Linux-supported), you will see the grudging trickle of admission ("OK, ok, you can get Linux preinstalled on Dell machines.") grow progressively wider. I hope so, because I'd like to write it.
You know what I think the most effecting thing to do would be? Call some Dell 800-numbers and politely ask about Linux availability. They'll get the message, just as soon as it goes through 39 MBAs and 107 interns;)
Dell is a big boat to turn (conservative, lots of mgt. folks, many divisions
timothy
(Opinions expressed are just that, of course.)
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Well, they are not going to open source it, so it can hardly be a true test of the open source concept. But maybe their "community license" is "close enough" to open source to get some of the benefits anyway.
I don't think we will see significant outside contributions unless they go all the way with open source, but they might see some minor fixes contributed by users.
Sun's not doing this because they want an office suite for Linux or Solairs. They're doing it so they have a place to start developing a thin-client Office suite for the Network Computer concept that they're still hung up on (read : way to sell more Sun servers). Star Office as we know it (large, MS-Like office suite) is going to eventually atrophy, simply because Sun doesn't really care about it (regardless of the 'Openess' of this, it's still basically Sun trying to enlist developers with thier silly Community License).
Sun also does Community Source Hardware. In a nutshell, if you have the tools and the knowledge, you can brew your own picoJava or SPARC workstation on a chip. :-)
Caveat: I'm not qualified to offer expert legal advice, however if you are a (hardware) designer and don't work for Sun, I strongly suggest that you have your legal department (Intellectual Property advisor-person) look over their (or anyone's) licenses before you download any of the "open" cores.
--The more you know, the less you know.