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Sun's StarOffice Release: Not Open Source
Bruce Perens wrote in to send us a link to an article he has written about Sun's StarOffice Release: Is It Really What You Think? It discusses the implications for Linux, and the fact that it technically isn't going to be released under a true Open Source license. Worth a read.
I think the article makes some very good points but there are a couple of things I wanted to comment on.
;)
:)
Firstly: the quote...
"Sun isn't going to make big revenues off of StarOffice while it's also giving it away for free from its own web site" fits the more traditional view of programming I think. Isn't the whole point of the free software push that you can have a very profitable (more so?) business based on "giving your product away". You can after all download RedHat and they seem to be making their money *shrug*
Secondly, while I am wary of the possible effects mentioned in the article wrt competition with the FS/OS products lets face it. The _biggest_ problem the office software market is facing is the stranglehold M$ has over it making it the defacto standard. As a result most people/businesses I know of don't even consider that there _are_ alternatives. More competition in this genre of products (even if among corporate products) is to the advantage of all surely? Maybe if there was a more diverse offering of office software available (especially corporate products for those businesses who still will not consider anything else) then the OS/FS products would be facing less of a mountain?
Lets encourage greater competition and welcome every step companies like Sun make in this direction. Maybe future steps will see them willing to consider that extra step - the OS/FS model is probably a pretty scarey choice for the corporates to go for
Just a thought (or three)
Economics 101 - You do not spend $450M on a product and give it completely away. Yes, Sun
own StarOffice, they paid for it. They are free
to license the software in any way they see fit,
and they see fit to use their own SCSL. The
SCSL is Sun's approach to peer review and
wider research without losing rights to what
they own. It's a different approach and Sun
should be applauded for using the model so
widely within their organisation.
"You know you want me baby!" - Crow T Robot
It's a well written essay, and I can appreciate Bruce's desire to help out, but I really think just about everything he said is pretty self-evident. If people are paying so little attention that they can't figure these things out for themselves, then I doubt they'll even bother to read this, let alone give it any thought. Are there any plans to get this into more mainstream media where it might actually do some good?
The Sun/AOL thing is still around. It's a joint venture type deal between Sun and Netscape (owned by AOL) originally known as the "Sun-Netscape Alliance," and it's been renamed to "iPlanet" for some reason. They're still around, since I saw an ad for iPlanet in last week's Forbes magazine. The ad touted Sun, AOL, and Netscape's history of innovation and delivery of great products based on great ideas, but didn't really mention what exactly it was that iPlanet would be doing.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
If that's correct, then going truly open source with StarOffice is clearly the right thing to do. It would mean that StarOffice would be distributed with pretty much every Linux CD. It would also mean that their would be numerous distribution points, instead of one.
Truly open-sourcing StarOffice would be a punch to Bill Gates' gut. As it is, the SCSL release will be little more than a slap to his face.
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Agreed. Although I think that it (a GPL or BSD release) would still achieve their prime objective here, which is to do damage to Microsoft's primary revenue stream.
But I would like to see them give up control on the distribution side of things, while perhaps retaining some control on the modification side.
That's really the only beef I have with the current plan; it doesn't accomplish Sun's (apparent) goals, because it will not achieve sufficient distribution if people have to download StarOffice seperately.
A QPL-type license would get the job done.
-- Posting this with Sun StarOffice, BTW! Not a half bad browser, if you have the RAM. I don't even think it leaks memory nearly as bad as Netscape.
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Loyalty is an interesting thing, and the cause of much flammage, but no-one really seems to understand it. Here are some general categories and my opinions expressed briefly...
My feeling is that in general:
-> Microsoft users are in the first category
-> 'Linux advocates' tend to be in the second category
-> 'Open-source' advocates tend to be in the third (I say this because despite the widespread use of the word 'philosophy', Open Source seems to really reject philosophical or ethical arguments in favor of strict utilitariansim, and even openly ridicules people who dare to contradict this approach.)
-> 'Free software' advocates tend to be spread between the third and fourth.
You may have guessed my general opinions on the subject, 1<2<3<4 (although there are people strongly commited to philosophies that are absolutely ridiculous but dangerous..)
Anyway, I'm not sure what my original point was going to be, except that being committed to a single program (Linux) seems to me to be a bit parochial and you should try to broaden your sights a little. I was probably going to say something like that
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
Also, why is it that when ever the topic of Linux being used in the enterprise comes up, silly arguments like "until Linux can run on 1024 processors with a terabyte of RAM and enough mass storage to store detailed tomatographic scans of every individual creature on the planet it wont displace a single (insert favorite high-end Unix vendor here...Sun, SGI, whatever...)"
There are many needs within an organization. Some call for the Big Iron. Many do not. And Linux will continue to grow and improve...currently it is doing so at a faster rate than any platform I know of. On top of that, it does a wonderfull job of playing well with others...vital in any enterprise.
Finally, why is it that ext2 is seen as the only Linux fs? Granted it is the general purpose standard. And it does a DAMN fine job at that. But it is far from the only one. Linus has very flexible fs support, allowing for many different ones to be used as appropriate to the task...even several at once if that is needed.
--
If your map and the terrain differ,
trust the terrain.
Couldn't you have someone who is working on the project with you go over their source code and then generate a specification document of the file layouts, how the code is supposed to work, etc. and then pass it off to someone else who hasn't looked at it and have them implement it? What would be any other legal procedures would one have to do to make sure that Sun (or anyone else with a similar license) doesn't come along and try to sue you for lifting their code?
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Of course, the italicization should be turned off after the first paragraph. That'll teach me to preview.
Bruce Perens.
Either I missed some news or you are mistaken about WordPerfect's licensing status.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I don't buy that figure either.
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I just don't buy the half-billion dollar figure. I'd like to see proof of that one.
People who say don't look a gift-horse in the mouth haven't ever met a trojan horse.
Again, I said it was good for Linux. I'd just like to see Sun play the game, and make their money off of support and books, etc.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Go back and look. I never mentioned the GPL. I mentioned Open Source licensing.
The SCSL means that if a company wishes to profit from distributing StarOffice, they must pay royalties to Sun.
Actually, it doesn't mean that. The SCSL doesn't permit commercial distribution at all. It's some other license that you'd have to get regarding royalties and commercial distribution. And Sun has no obligation to give you that license.
However, if Sun chose to cease to support a particular platform, or took the product in a direction that the user base did not like, then the source is available. The community could continue to develop and support the product itself.
However, Sun is not obligated to allow those people to distribute their modifications and it's not obligated to offer them a commercial license. Thus, the software could die anyway.
They cannot take StarOffice away from you, or hamper it by failing to support new technologies, requiring you to move on to a new product.
They definitely can't take it away. Their license can prohibit the distribution of modifications, though, unless you're a research user. So, you're stuck with fixing it yourself, without the community's help.
So instead they [redhat] turn to tightening their trademarks.
Note that they did that without damaging the Open Source status of their distribtuion. I'd discussed using trademarks for product differentiation while keeping your product Open Source before, in fact I wrote the policy that Debian uses to restrict its trademark to protect their "Official CD". In my opinion RH was not out of line and should be commended for using that strategy rather than incorporating non-Open-Source components.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Yes, they're going to make indirect revenues, but they're not going to make royalties. So a license strategy that protects their royalties doesn't make sense.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Sun can stop the free distribution from its own site. They can't stop researchers from distributing to other researchers, for all that matters. So yes, there's a good potential for "yank" strategies in the futrue.
Miguel says the Gnumeric spreadsheet is going really well and has pretty good Excel importing. I think we're a bit behind regarding word processing, but there are at least three efforts in progress. If we want to rely on something, we just have to make sure there's a version compliant with the OSD.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
You have a choice of their NPL clone or the GPL.
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Once it was found out, the code would be removed, and perhaps the rogue would be charged with one or more crimes. The best defense is being able to trace where your contributions are coming from. Save mail archives and CVS logs forever.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Sun gains nothing useful from this partial closure of the source, despite what they say. They know that the time their developers spend on improving this product in-house is time and money lost. They must know that they would just gain, gain, gain, if they opened StarOffice up completely.
Why then are they doing as they are? As anyone that works for a *big* company will tell you, the answer is simple: internal politics and inertia, development divisions holding grimly on to old methods of working, marketing divisions holding on to old methods of licensing, and so on, that's all.
There is an analogy that can be made here, referring to big brass in Sun management: big dinosaurs move and think slowly. The question is, will they see the light soon enough, change, and survive?
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Secondly, I can understand where Sun's license is coming from, and really in practicality it's not really any different than most opensource projects, except for the notable difference that only Sun can distribute the source. I mean, most opensource projects just have a single code maintainer and a single codebase when it comes down to it (though most projects using CVS these days does kind of distribute that load). However, this is disregarding the fact that in most opensource projects, the person(s) running that project usually care enough to make sure that it keeps with the freedom that opensource brings, and for the ones which aren't, someone can always fork development and do their own thang, preferrably better.
My main concern with the Sun license is that they may just sit on their asses and never incorporate any changes. At least with the GPL, should Linus suddenly get the stupids, someone else could fork it and release their own source tree. Also, hasn't this technically already happened with the various embedded projects, etc.? Though StarOffice doesn't immediately seem to be the kind of thing that'd need specialization-based forking, it probably could be. StarOffice on a wearable computer, for example, would need to have a completely different interface, which means either hoping the Sun folks would want to maintain multiple source trees (unlikely) or forking the source (not possible right now).
Whatever the case, at least this gives people many more choices. If anything, at least people can feel free to use Linux on any architecture and compile it for it, rather than having to use a supported architecture. What good does StarOffice binary releases for IA32, PPC, RS6k, MIPS, and StrongARM do if you need to run it on a simulated Merced?
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
It may be that we are accustomed with the spirit of GPL that many of us are awaken with _shock_ that Sun is not releasing the StarOffice under GPL.
But we have to understand that Sun was and is never a part of the opensource community. Unlike RedHat, Suse, or Slackware that growed up along with (after the appearance of) Linux, Sun had been a commercialized enterprises _before_ anyone ever heard of Linux at all !
Unless something really drastic happened, I do not forsee Sun changes its stance in regarding the opensource matter.
Sun, like many of the older establishment, (such as MicroSoft), have great trouble believing in the benefits of opensource. True, Sun _does_ benefit from opensource projects such as Linux (and in a way, FreeBSD), - they simply sell more workstations because the demand created by the availability of opensource OS (and proggys) - but as long as Sun remains in the hand of the person who doesn't subscribe to the philosophy of opensource, there will be no chance for us to see StarOffice become a truly opensource program.
It's a shame, but then, c'est la vie !
On the other hand, there _are_ other programs that are opensourced, such as Abiword, Corel's Wordperfect, and the Saig-Officesuite project (I may have type the name wrong, but you get my point).
The StarOffice is not opensource, that is what we already know. If we insist on having a _truly_ opensourced officesuite, then my advice to the opensource community is to put our support behind the 3 projects above.
I understand that the 3 projects above do not have the scope as wide and as extensive as the StarOffice, but then at least they are a start.
If anyone is looking for a similar officesuite thingy that is not exactly opensource, then go look up the applixware thing.
There may be other opensource projects that have similar goal that I have missed. If so, please add on to this message and take this chance to annouce to the world and surf the wave on the Slashdot Effect (tm).
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I'm concerned by all the comments on this story saying "Well, it's free, and that's good enough for me. Who cares if it's open source."
On a case-by-case basis, this works just fine. Take yer free stuff and be happy. But when you look at the big picture, it falls apart. I don't think I need to go into specifics on this - just think about this scenario:
Torvalds Software, Ltd. releases the Linux Kernel (c)(tm)(r)($) for free, but with restrictions on it's commercial use and redistribution. Xfree86 Partners, Inc. releases their version of the X-Windows system, but you can't make any modifications to it. Gnu Gurus, LLC has a whole nifty suite of Unix-compatible tools, and their down-rev versions are always available in binary form, for free download. These three things together are a good foundation for a "free" Unix system.
But - given that foundation, do you think Linux would be anywhere near where it is today? Would anyone be developing any software for this thing, closely held by some companies, under licenses which may someday change radically?
To me, accepting "Free Beer" software is akin to saying "That's enough - we can stop moving forward now" because if enough of the "foundations" of Linux become less-than free, I really believe that the whole thing will slowly fall apart in the future. I think that "free beer" software, much more so than traditional commercial software, contributes to this complacency.
Sometimes, if there's no alternative and I have a task I must accomplish, I'll use non-free software, but I try to avoid it for the reasons above.
There is no doubt that Microsoft dominates the business productivity software market. MS Word is so utterly ubiquitous that it's a suprise to find a company using anything else. This control and ownership of the application space, together with their obvious monopoly in desktop operating systems, gives them a convincing edge when it comes to the back end.
People assume that since they are using Microsoft apps, on a Microsoft operating system, it is natural and proper that the back end server should run Microsoft too - whether it be simple NT file and print, or things like SQL Server and Proxy Server. Surely it must be better to have a single supplier for all these things, rather than an rag-bag of products from different suppliers?
(Of course, in reality, a system which uses hetrogenous components with well-defined protocols operating between them is likely to be much more robust, easier to support, and more future proof. And of course if more people built such systems there would be more competition in the software industry, with all the advantages in terms of pricing and features which that would bring. But oh well. "We're a Microsoft shop.")
With the StarOffice deal, Sun is making a clever strategic move. They are betting that they can upset the applications apple-cart sufficiently to cause some re-alignment in the market. They don't have to make money from StarOffice directly; they just have to make enough of a splash with it that people reconsider their IT strategies. It will be hard for even the most died-in-the-wool Microsoft-loving manager to ignore the cost advantages of rolling out StarOffice instead of MS Office (imaging being able to tell his employees "you can copy this to use at home if you want"). And if he's going to do that, he might as well also consider looking at, say, Linux on the desktop instead of Windows. Either way, it might also make him a little more open minded about the back end.
Not that he'll necessarily choose Sun at the back end. That isn't really the point. Sun don't particularly mind if HP and IBM benefit from their strategy too. This isn't a Solaris-vs-every-other-UNIX strategy - it's a pure anti-Microsoft one. And it makes economic sense.
The bottom line is this. If the people who make the decisions can be pursuaded to see beyond Microsoft, Sun will gain.
In any shake-up of the market which reduces Microsoft's dominance, Sun are in a good position to reap the rewards. They'd rather have 40% of a UNIX-dominated market than 5% of a Microsoft-dominated one.
It's a good strategy. Giving away Star Office is a good move. In particular, giving it away to Windows users (who are not accustomed to such practices in the same way we UNIX people are) will win them a *lot* of "hearts and minds".
And the GPL? Nice though it would be, we must realise that GPLing the software wouldn't suit Sun's strategic plan for StarOffice. They need a little more control than the GPL offers. That said, I personally do trust them to engage the community and accept patches etc. Despite what has been said by some people in this discussion, Sun actually have a pretty good open source record. Consider things like OpenLook, an excellent (though now rather dated) X toolkit which they gave away in source form. They've also given away reference RPC implementations (remember, RPC is a standard Sun gave us) and NFS software (NFS too is a Sun standard). They are of course a money-grabbing corporate, but they are still "the good guys" in my opinion.
No, it's not Open Source(TM), but it is an office suite with source code available. So no, the source code can't be swallowed into other projects, and no, StarOffice can't become part of the GNU Hurd kernel.
But companies and institutions looking for an office suite they can audit for security, lock down features on, and that lets them take fixing bugs into their own hands, will have something they could well be happy with.
Whine, whine, whine. StarOffice would be pretty hard to GPL even if Mr, McNealy smoked something funny and decided to do it. The file conversion filters, for example, are the same commercial ones everyone licenses from Inso. And the VBA scripting engine under it is probably 3rd-party, too.
And once you rip out the 3rd-party commercial stuff, I'm sure we'd hear no end to the whining about the proprietary GUI toolkit it's built with.
You want a free office suite? Go work on KOffice. It seems to have potential. Don't like the Qt license? Then go work on AbiWord and Gnumeric or something. Stop begging for table scraps.
the reasons:
It's fair to day StarOffice is the office suite for Linux currently
All in all maybe not a bargain, but not that much either, considering that SUN had little choice but to buy them. They would have relied on StarOffice anyway.
Netscape's browser was not completely free when first released. It was free for educational/non-commercial use only. If you were a commercial user, you were allowed to download it for evaluation purposes, but you couldn't legally keep using it without paying.
And it did work for them. There were many companies, including a former employer of mine that actually bought licenses for the browser. Of course, we got a volume discount, so it was only USD $10 or so per seat.
Big deal, at least it's free. That alone is 100% better than M$ can say.
:)
True, and I thought that too at first, but read the article, he raises some interesting points about what effect this can have on true open source office applications. Plus (although far fetched), Sun could gain a monopoly on the unix office market, then change the licensing at will.
That, and I don't agree with your gun views
Finkployd
Ideological arguments aside, the big deal is that their pricing is
only dictated by market conditions. Thus, if they beat their
competition (Microsoft and Corel), they could start charging
Microsoft scale money for it. If you are looking for products that
are "cheap/free" then nothing but OS/FS will do in the long run.
However I tend to agree that ideological arguments mostly fail for
office suites: the people who use them would usually not obtain
any empowerment or freedom by having access to code. For a
secretary, the spell-checker either works or it doesn't - s/he will
not even imagine fixing it.
In general I feel that software aimed at people who are not aware of
why or how it runs, who have not heard of source code and who
emphatically do not want to get into this stuff (examples would be
office suites, games, organizers, banking software) - such software
need not be open-source ideologically, but it does need to be
open source for pricing reasons. If most users are unlikely to scratch
their own itch, then open source is equivalent to or even worse than
closed source, in the sense that such open source software will be
underdeveloped (due to lack of programmers' interest) compared to
its closed brethern.
Sun is good hardware. It's very good hardware. It's also very different than a PC. PC's are designed specifically to do the average tasks well, they are personal computers after all. Sun hardware (Workstations in general) are designed to high end things well. My experience has shown that Suns are not necessarily huge number crunchers as much as high end servers, they do well at things like gargantuan databases or web servers or applications that require large amounts of I/O and memory. Of course you'll get better bang for the buck out of a PC, You probably get better bang for the buck out of Toyota Camry than a Ferrari too depending on how you want to make the argument, but given the choice anyone will choose the Ferrari.
I've used Linux/x86 for a long long time. I've used Sun for a long long time. Linux/x86, as cool as it is, has a long way to go to match up to Sun when it comes to beating the disks, handling the network i/o and maintaining some shred of respectable interactive performance. I dont know what's wrong with your 28 processor machine, but it's in your company's best interest to figure out what, becasue you should be getting way more performance out of that million dollar iron.
-Rich
It's not free in the way the Open-Source crowd would like it to be. It's not "free-speech" free, only "free-beer" free.
It is a big deal, as this is not acceptable to the true Open Source warrior.
My personal views differ somewhat, however, as I'm primarily "Anything But Microsoft".
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
BSD, GPL, QPl, et al = 98% to 100% Free
SD's StarOffice = 50% Free
Sun's StarOffice = 75% Free
MSOffice = 0% Free
Overall, I think that the world has gained a little bit. No it's not perfect, but do you really expect the world to be perfect?
Former dictatorship Badinovia announced that they will now have free elections. However, they still have not released 59 political prisoners. We then congratulate them on their improving human rights records will continuing to urge further reforms.
Likewise, Sun should be congratulated for issuing Free Beer and the releasing the source code. We should continue urging them to take further steps towards a true Open Source release.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
So what would the world be like if everything was freeware instead of Free Software?
First of all, the users wouldn't care too much, since they've never cared much about the source code anyway. There are some exceptions, of course, but they are few and far between. The majority of Linux users who are not developers are using it because it's free beer and robust, not because it's GPL'd or Open Source or hackable or anything like that.
Developers on the other hand, still want the source code and they still want the freedom to fix bugs and add features, and distribute those modification. Exactly the same impetus exists that started Richard on his path to GNU and Linux on his path to Linux. When you know how to code, you won't put up with an official fixpack that won't be released for six months.
Developers will still start Free Software projects to replace freeware, they just won't have the widespread support of the masses behind them.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The reason StarOffice is not being released as Free Software is that Sun still wants some semblance of control over it (they did spend millions on it after all).
But by releasing it as GPL or BSD, they could potentially lose all control of it (at least in their minds if not in reality). But if they release it under the MPL, QPL or Artistic licenses, StarOffice would be Free and Open Source, and they would still have some measure of control over the project.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This means that after Sun runs MS into the ground, Sun can close everything back up, change the formats and reap the upgrade-treadmill rewards.
Any that would be wrong how? Sorry I don't subscribe to the 100% Open Source Bugaboo, as long as we have companies turning out good products for cheap/free (That excludes MS in most cases). I find it hard to Demonize a company for keeping the hard work of the programmers closed to the Open Source rabble.
Ok this is probably going to set off the sprinklers, but it's the harsh truth....
Wishful thinking... Really Linux is a threat to Sun like it is to Microsoft. Despite the Zeal and Fever let's face it, in a business environment, it's always "the right tool for the right job". Often this means picking things based on market share, as opposed to "better" solutions.
They used to say "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", the saying may have died but the reality is still there. If it comes to desktops for the users, I'll (Eris help me) pick Microsoft everytime. Just so I can send users to someone else for training, help desk, and to make my life infinately less complicated when they decide to buy company X's whiz bang proprietary software that only run's on Windoze. Just the same as with any DB app, it's off to a Sun Server, running Solaris 2.6 (2.7 still needs some work).
Do I think Linux has a place, sure I do, but it's not in the corporation, not now at least. It's still needs some serious growing up. It also sit's (typically) on HW that I just don't fundamentaly trust. That's why I pick Sun HW, People don't seem to get that Sun is first, and foremost a HW company, any software they do is mearly teasers to get you to buy their HW.
Sorry, but them's the facts...
"All software that requires no costly payments is good software."
And how do you know that StarOffice will continue to not require costly payments?
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"An armed society is a polite society" -- Robert Heinlein
Linux MAPI Server!
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Microsoft, despite being primarily a software company, is a direct threat to them, as MS s/w doesn't run on Sun hardware. NcNally et al would probably be better off from a business sense sweet-talking MS into porting NT to Sun hardware. I don't mean that as flame-bait, I wouldn't like to see it happen either, but it would probably allow Sun to make more money. Inspite of this, MS software is probably far too inflexible to run on some of the more interesting Sun hardware (failover servers with everything duplicated in one box, running the same commands simultaneously!). Some of the stuff they do is incredibly difficult even in Unix, never mind NT.
So, to answer the question, what does Sun gain from this, is that Sun moves people away from, for at least applies the breaks to the juggernaught of people moving to MS products and hence away from any services Sun can offer. By promoting anything non-MS they can only be doing themselves a favour.
What we really need to look at is how much Sun makes per-annum on their hardware and support services, I would bet it vastly outweighs whatever they make on software. In this situation you don't really loose anything by giving away your software to promote your hardware and services. Its the traditional loss-leader approach. The typical example of which is, it costs you one pound sterling to make and serve a cup of coffee/tea, yet you sell it for fifty pence. Why? Because it brings people into your establishment and these people invariably buy other items which you are making a profit on. If I were Sun this is precisely what I would be doing. Promote the Linux angle in any way you can, even if the early adopters don't give you any money, once it takes off and really moves into the large corporates they will be clamouring for larger, better, faster, more reliable hardware to run it on, which Sun will be quite happy to provide. When you add to this the fact that Sun is also benefiting from the work of the Linux/GNU community, ie it doesn't have to spend a fortune paying its own developers to debug the software, add new features, etc then its costs come down further. What you do is put a few developers, maybe a few hundred out of your throusands, into developing the software and working with the community to nudge it to go the way you want (remember here that you are a good guy 'cos you are "unselfishly" donating to the common good, so everybody is only too happy to oblige). What you do with the rest of your developers is have them supporting obscure bugs for your paying customers, writing support for your hardware, porting old apps to the new system, etc. If they went fully towards Linux they could drop large numbers of software developers, quietly of course to prevent comment and bad feelings. Sun knows that what it has to do is build up the Linux user base, even if everyone is using x86 or PPC. This built up base will inevitably generate the need for high end systems that the x86 and PPC are unable to provide. Sun can't really loose here, if they do nothing they will loose sales, this can't hurt them significantly but it could potentially do them a lot of good.
Stealing a rhinoceros should not be attempted lightly.
As a mere user, the central issue as I see it is whether the license will encourage programmers to gift their skills and thus make StarOffice as fast as M$Office and more functional.
It looks like SCSL won't do this. So StarOffice will follow Netscape into obscurity.
Bill Gates must be grateful to Scott McN for not taking away half of the M$ profit stream.
"Captain, I cannot believe my ears!" - Spock
In the article he seems to draw the conclusion that the SCSL restricts freedom, compared to the GPL, but in my opinion this is not necessarily the case. Contrary to most people's opinions here I think that StarOffice is now free as in "free-speech", but not as in "free-beer".
:P
The SCSL means that if a company wishes to profit from distributing StarOffice, they must pay royalties to Sun. This is fair enough, as Sun have invested money in buying the product. For example, were RedHat to include SO in their distribution, Sun would have a right to demand a cut of the money RedHat made.
However, if Sun chose to cease to support a particular platform, or took the product in a direction that the user base did not like, then the source is available. The community could continue to develop and support the product itself. They cannot take StarOffice away from you, or hamper it by failing to support new technologies, requiring you to move on to a new product (eg. try using MS Office95 in an environment where collegues are handing you Office97 documents - it soon becomes necessary to upgrade).
The main point I want to make is this: look at RedHat's recent activity with trademarks. RedHat are in a position where anyone can visit RH's web site, download RH's distribution, cut CDs and sell it as their own product. If Redhat could release their Linux distro under SCSL they could demand royalties off anyone doing this, however as Linux is GPLed they can't, so they cannot make any money out of people ripping off their hard work. So instead they turn to tightening their trademarks. What next? incorporate propriety non-GPLed software into RedHat Linux, to prevent other people re-distribuing it? Introduce closed standards and file formats? The GPL introduces many problems for a company like RedHat, preventing them from making fair profit and pushing them into these sorts of tricks.
At the an operating system is only useful if it has software to run on it. Developers will only produce software for Linux if it has a large enough user base. Users will only come to Linux in large numbers if it is relatively easy to use. Companies like RedHat will only work on Linux, and support projects such as Gnome, KDE, and Enlightenment, if they can make a profit in return. Draw your own concusions about where Linux goes from here under thr GPL.
Just my opinion - I'm just saying the GPL isn't perfect. Okay, so I've insulted the GPL. Let the flaming begin
Considering what kind of freedom we had with the source code when StarDivision was in control... effectively Zero. Complaining about what we haven't gained seems a little imature & premature as this story is far from over (infact the license has not come into effect as yet) and other developments might heareld a more open view on StarOffice's availability.
Also the sheer impossible hope that Sun was going to pay a half a billion dollars for a company to effectively "open source" it would have been delusional. It just does not work that way with entities whose prime function is to make a profit period. In this age of wall street highs, exploding growth in technological industries and cannabalising mergers and takeovers, it hardly seems realistic to think that Sun would only rely on indirect methods of revenue from the product. I would not be amazed to hear after StartOffice has gained sufficent market share that Sun started charging a nominal fee for the currently free version.
Seriously, how much are they going to make from workstation and server sales because some individuals have StarOffice at home ? Though I do not want to give the false impretion that I feel negatively about this whole affair. It was a brave move on their part to invest in this product and realease the code, though under their restricted license. My dad always said don't look a gift horse in the mouth. While we haven't got the ideal situation in terms of source code. Showing Sun what the excellent Open Source communitu can do with their code might convince them to give us a chance.
Though the colour of money is green and everybody lacks some green in their lives.