Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Star Office to be Community Sourced, confirmed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-it-while-the-getting-is-good dept.

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.

2 of 167 comments (clear)

  1. Idiots. by perry · · Score: 4

    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.

  2. Link for Sun Community Source License... by EnglishTim · · Score: 4

    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