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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."
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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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.
And what if someone doesn't use KDE?
Oh.. if only applications were 'desktop environment independent'. Unix has a history of having lots of tools doing useful stuff, which can be combined in lots of useful ways. I wish graphical applications were more like that.
I don't like the idea of having a "gapplication" and a "kapplication" for everything. That's a lot of unnecessary duplication if you ask me.
But hey, that's just me.
Greetings,
Ivo
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.
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.
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.