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SUN and Star Office's Licence agreement.
DaveHowe writes "Interesting speculative piece in ZDnet about SUN's long term plans for StarOffice and of course it's development into StarPortal; It's a little TOO anti-SUN not to be taken with a pinch of salt, but does raise a couple of interesting points:That the licence for current downloads is non-redistributable, and requires registration, and
That there is no guarantee that Sun won't withdraw StarOffice at some point after StarPortal is active, leaving the Linux community high and dry."
Am I confusing you?
Star Office Portal does not run your laptop. Am I still confusing you?
Jilles
Wait a minute! A *compiler* company sued because vendors bundled software with the hardware that the company sold? As in the compiler company couldn't sell their compilers because the OS had compilers pre-installed, and you didn't need another one? And they Won?
Something comes to mind... Netscape. IE. Microsoft. Netscape. Windows. Netscape. Bundled. Trial. Precedent. Netscape. And the *accusation* that Netscape couldn't sell their browser because *they* failed as a company? It's all clear now.
-Brent--
That said, I am scratching my head over the way Sun has licensed this.
What is the real goal here? I presume, like many others, that the goal is to "cut off Microsoft's air supply," by going after their big cash cow, Office.
If that is true, the current license (as well as the SCSL, under which the source, when released, will be licensed) doesn't accomplish the goal, due to its limitations on redistribtion.
Why not, at the very least, allow unlimited redistribution of binaries? That would get StarOffice into more hands, which gets Sun closer to the goal of damaging Microsoft's revenue stream.
Presumably, Sun isn't going to make a lot of cash selling StarOffice, since they are giving it away. So, why not let others distribute? I really don't understand the reasoning behind that.
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Are you sure? :-)
it is slow compared to MS Office. On Linux it takes about a minute to load
I just started it. It took 8 seconds, on a Celeron 300(450). That's not really fast, but it's not that bad.
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K Office is coming along quite nicely and actually looks better than Star Office anyway. There already KLyx for those that really need something like that. KOffice will force Corel and Sun, maybe even Microsoft (by then who knows) into at least keeping their suites "free beer".
support gun control: take guns from cops
KOffice is irrelevant at this moment. It's a promising product but a finished version that can compete with MS/Star/Wordperfect is a long time away for us.
I don't think SUN has bought Star Office to make money on it. At least not directly. What they are hoping to do is boost server sales (hardware that is). For that reason it wouldn't surprise me if they will be giving start office portal away for free or for a relatively low fee. Once they finished it their main concern will be to get as much copies in the market as possible (running on sun servers). Asking a lot of money for it won't help so they won't.
I think one month or so ago when sun bought Star there was this guy (forgot the name) who claimed that if Sun would not get their suit onto 5 of the most important internet portals, it would have failed. Seen in that light it is very likely they will give the software away for free.
Jilles
The only thing that has changed about StarOffice registration since Sun bought it is that now you don't get 30days to try it out before handing over your details. StarOffice always said that to continue using it after 30days without registering it was illegal so I don't really see what the difference is. The only major problem I can see with the change is the modification to the distribution model in that it becomes less easy for people to give it away free on Cover Discs and such like. As for Sun's desire to take over the world in place of Microsoft, who knows only time will tell about any of these things.
Unlike Microsoft, Sun actually delivers some high-quality products.
Just this morning, some bozo's scripts drove the load on an UltraSPARC-based web server up to ~38. No problem...I went in and killed his processes. The machine was still responsive, even under that kind of a load.
Solaris is still more scalable than Linux (although I prefer Linux for most uses these days).
Java is an excellent language, even if the runtime implementation is subpar.
Sun makes a lot of good stuff. Yes, we have to make sure we don't get cornered by them or any other vendor, but to compare them with Microsoft is unfair, IMO.
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The compatiblity with MS Office is greatly exaggerated.
My anecdotal experience with interoperability highlights some significant limitations, primarily the limitation that StarOffice is more interoperable with Office2000 than previous Office95 or Office97 releases. I took a number of spreadsheets I use frequently and was unable to import any sort of chart from Excel95 into StarOffice (including pie, bar, scatter, and line charts.)
The point of spreadsheets and manipulating data is to A) understand what's going on and to B) cleanly and simply express what's going on to someone else. Thus charting constitutes about 50% of a spreadsheet program's value, a fact not reflected by Sun's 95%+ interoperability claims. (For those interested, Sun's precise interoperability claims are documented in hundreds of pages of documentation, mostly comparing to Office2000.)
The irony is that to get interoperability with StarOffice, such as ability to import Excel charts, corporations will have to first upgrade to Office2000 and save all files in that format before moving to StarOffice!
So I wouldn't spend too much time paying attention to StarOffice; it won't be giving MS problems any time soon (unfortunately for all our pocketbooks.) For offices/homes not needing such a conversion, I imagine it'll work fine, but currently poor compatibility will prevent it from harnessing network effects and getting a positive feedback loop going as an Office replacement. It's just cheap software.
Sigh.
--LP
"Epeeist" touches on this, and it is something that is often forgotten in debates like this. There is the corporate market and the home market and their needs (and their budgets) are different.
The user at home does not need an office suite, and, as someone else posted further down the stream, are often better off getting individual, separate packages. Don't need a spreadsheet app? Don't get a spreadsheet app./Don't get a bloated office suite. And cost is usually more important a factor to the home buyer than it is for the corporate buyer.
Corporations have to consider "total cost of ownership" which includes such things as:
- cost of maintenance,
- cost of installation (And installing the app once on a network server rather than 'nnn' times on individual workstations is a no-brainer!)
- cost of interoperability between your apps and data and outside sources.
Add into that the importance to a corporate network of having everybody use the same version of the software. ("I'm sorry, could you please redo that data you sent me? I only have [your version number - 1].")
Sun is aiming at the corporate office. That is where they expect to see their money made. I get the impression that they don't care about the home market.
This does not preclude a universe where Sun servers provide network apps to a network of, say, Linux clients.
In a word, be calm. Take a deep breath. Sun is not going to destroy Linux.
Yes there is. And the point is innovation. Microsoft has loadly proclaimed the superiority of having only one choice. But is that the best? Does Microsoft really innovate, or do they just care about changing the software enough to keep people forking over the dough.
Competing against yourself is a very good idea. Many companies do this, especially when there isn't other competition. It's like running. You may run fast by yourself. But you'll run faster if someone is chasing you with a knife.
It could be said, "Yes, but we will always be trying to keep ahead of Microsoft, won't that cause enough innovation?" I'd have to disagree. Sure, right now maybe Microsoft is ahead, but it won't always be. But in the future, if KDE is the standard platform, they won't be able to stagnate because there'll be Gnome right behind them forcing them to keep ahead. Likewise, Gnome will be forced to keep innovating to try to get ahead of KDE.
The best thing Microsoft could have done a few years ago was split Windows up into 2 different divisions. Each division would have been responsible for developing and marketing their OS independently. They would have had real innovation, and also would have self-restrained themselves from being able to violate anti-trust laws.
Let's learn from Microsoft and realize that having both Gnome and KDE are a good thing. Don't make the mistake of thinking that we only need one desktop environment.
--
> This isn't troll talk - it is slow compared to
> MS Office. On Linux it takes about a minute to
> load, on windows, around about the same. ewww.
> MS Office takes like 2 seconds (per app).
Windows generally preloads the libraries
for Office into RAM so that bloated pigs
like Word will start faster. Try closing the
Office toolbar and then opening Word and
look at the difference in load time.
The only way of selling starportal is to have a broad userbase among different platforms, so it would be totally counterproductive NOT to keep on developing the Linux, Solaris whatever version.. Remeber sun is plannnig to push staroffice to all major PC-makers, like Dell, etc...
I would be very surprised if not more ports will appear rather than less..
/kisses from Sweden.
Our users are very happy using StarOffice on their Win32 systems. It would really kick ass if KOffice is also released in a Win32 version for those cyber-lightweights not yet ready to change operating systems.
I have a whole department full of "marginal" computer users who don't have either time or incliniation to learn an OS. Just want to sit down and type a report. Another office suite that is not built around Word or WordPerfect but reads and writes compatible files would be welcome by them.
D. Keith Higgs
CWRU. Kelvin Smith Library
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
The registration is Sun's standard registration for any of their products, not specifically for StarOffice. Once you register for one of their products you can download any of them with the same registration. This is no different than for any other software you download from commercial organizations (for example, Acrobat reader, Real Player, etc).
When you are given the opportunity to moderate, it would be nice to be also allowed to moderate the main story.
If a story gets moderated down as redundant by too many people, it would be removed from the main page (but still accessible from the search page or other cross-references). That could help a bit in reducing the duplicates that pop up from time to time on /.
For the main story, the effect of moderation would only be to hide the story if it gets many negative points. The score would not be displayed on the main page. Positive points would be ignored (except for cancelling the negative ones).
-Raphaël
A famous economist once observed that if you could find a way to clean up all the air pollution in the entire US at a total cost of $2 per state, someone would still object. That quote comes to mind when I see people bitching about corporations not doing enough for or giving enough to the Linux "community". Honestly, some people sound like spoiled little brats who want the world handed to them on a platter, and when they get it, they complain about the shape of the platter. Let me make this clear: Linux is already a juggernaut. It will take over a significant chunk of the desktop market. We'll have more good software available, both free and commercial, than we can shake a mouse pad at. What Sun does with StarOffice won't matter one bit a year from now. Take a deep breath. Step back from the keyboard. Repeat after me, "The war is over. We won."
Whether this is true or not is neither here nor there. But the only way to play safe and avoid being 'shafted' by a commercial offering is to stick with Open Source where possible. Me, I'm waiting for KOffice. Star Office doesn't even appear on my radar.
Macka
Star Office should be viewed as an 'intermediate' step - a usable, temporary solution until a more suitable true, GPL'ed Office suite is available.
There are some good starting points AbiWord and Gnumeric spring to mind. Thing is, it doesn't seem that most folk need all that software anyway - it seems they've been 'convinced' that they need it.
Yes, it is too early to speculate what (if any) changes Sun will make to Star's availability/terms of use, so we should wait and see. However, at a minimum (for me to use it on my home linux box anyway), the licensing must be compliant with the Open Source Definition. Sun doesn't like Linux - their membership in Linux International seems to be just to sell hardware. They want you to use Solaris, and pay them for their compilers and development licenses.
Skipping the comments on whom do they resemble with this practice you are indeed right:
All support for the pre-Sun age has been discontinued. There is no way you can verify licence codes, reclaim support or whatever (at least from the Sun site at the moment).
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
What the hell are you talking about?
"The war is over. We won." What???
Nobody won anything. One of RMS's key ideas is that we must be weary of "open source" companies retracting their code at some point leaving us "high and dry." This is a very real threat.
Actually, StarOffice really blows. I've used it more times than I care to admit. Each time I get a little more frustrated with it. IMHO, it is a poorly written program that needs to be hit over the head because it wants to do too much (don't copy %*$%& Office - you can't copy its feature set - they don't have the sheer number of people that MS does). And, StarOffice can't even do those things very well (or even passably well) on ANY platform (I've tried on Windows, Linux, and on Solaris).
Sun just bought StarDivision to placate some people in OSS community, then they will start charging through the nose for the software. Remember that Sun does not like giving away products. You DO know how much a Sun workstation costs? An Ultra-5 can easily run $5k. Their mid-level servers are about $100k. Their enterprise level servers are $1m and up. This is of course not including all of the software that you must buy. If you want their development studio (C++, etc with an IDE), it is about $5-6k as well. I have heard that it is very good, but it is very hard to justify the cost for it.
Sun was never going to buy StarDivision and keep it for free. They plan to make money (lots) off of it. Sun wants nothing more than to become the next MS.
Face it, we lost. You just don't know it yet.
Justin
Mu. P.S. The address you see is real. =)
Not the fault of the vendors. A compiler company (Greenhills?) sued for restraint of trade because most vendors were giving away a Pascal compiler with their UNIX release. They won their case, and vendors were only allowed to ship compilers necessary to build the operating system. Because Sun and IBM (but not HP!) have dynamic kernels that don't need compiling, they no longer are allowed to ship a C compiler.
Yup, McNealy has always been pretty abrasive. But has anyone considered that McNealy's abrasiveness towards MS is deliberate?
5 years ago, Sun would always compare itself to other Unix workstation companies: DEC, HP, SGI. The rhetoric was probably the thickest where DEC was concerned.
Sun then had about $1 billion in sales per year.
McNealy started taking aim at M$ when the hype for NT began. Always with a twisted barb at the ready, he tended to get quoted in the trade press. And what has been the effect? In ZD publications it isn't just "Sun" it is "Microsoft's arch-nemesis, Sun".
Sun now has over $15 billion in sales per year.
Being portrayed as the only staunchly anti-Microsoft computer company has distinct advantages. It means you get invited to bid on lots of large server contracts, because you are seen as the only reasonable alternative platform. These are contracts that "Sun, workstation company" would never be invited to bid on, but "Sun, Microsoft arch-nemesis" does.
The trouble is that KOffice requires Qt, and Qt for Windows is not only non-Free, it is very expensive (Over $1,000/developer). In order for a KOffice port to happen, someone would have to take the QPL'ed Unix/Linux version and develop a patch to port it to Windows.
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Open mind, insert foot.
Instead of thinking about your own circumstances, think about the organisation with 10,000+ PCs. Now try and imagine the costs of distributing new software, service packs, installing new discs to replace crashed ones, resetting configurations because users have screwed their old ones, cleaning up after viruses, etc. etc.
All of this is estimated to cost in the order of thousands of dollars per year per user. For "non-power" users (for example help desk operators, or counter staff) the use of NCs look attractive, none of the problems above means a much lower maintenance cost. This doesn't mean that PCs will go away, they will still be about for those who need them.
This isn't troll talk - it is slow compared to MS Office. On Linux it takes about a minute to load, on windows, around about the same. ewww. MS Office takes like 2 seconds (per app). ...all the way. He's not 'evil', hi's company is aggressive when it comes to business (but what company wouldn't be).....Gates comes off to me as a nice guy - a geeky guy. McNealy comes off as a businessman with a disturbing anti-microsoft and a 'i want to be gates' complex (kindda like Ellison).
The article did bring up an interesting point - who would you rather have as a dictator? Gates or McNealy?
I'd rather have Gates
My prediction? Sun will capture many businesses etc with their workstations eventually - then everyone will be complaining about the monster that is AOL/SUN/ORACLE.
Would I rather have Sun or Microsoft lead the software industry? Microsoft all the way.
Everything Sun does today is to undermine Microsoft - it's so obvious. Their campaign for '100% pure' java, their network computing push, their aquisition of StarOffice, their alliance with Netscape.
Just check out scott mcnealy's website at sun.com, it's a page full of anti-microsoft garbage. you don't see anything like that on bill gates' site. he's professional about these things.