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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.
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.
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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.
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