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StarOffice Boss Says He Chose Sun License over GPL for Good Reasons
pointwood writes "StarOffice founder Marco Boerries states that he actually could have made StarOffice available under the GPL, but gives a number of reasons to why he thinks Sun's community License was a better choice" The Register has the story . Interesting thoughts on "free" software licensing from a business perspective.Meanwhile, a LinuxPlanet opinion piece claims a GPLed StarOffice would be better for Sun. What's your take?
Lots of companies pledge their support of open source software but no-one's actually put money on the table. You don't ask for a Linux job at IBM. SGI laid off 3000 Linux candidates. Sun made a pledge and how much of Sun's engineering are you using on your Linux box? Sun is building instant access to their portal into StarOffice. No features are being improved. No bugs are being fixed. StarOffice is still incompatible with libc2.1 a year after libc2 was obsoleted and they're not ever going to port it. Sun wants to get hits, not make a better word processor.
This guy just got to the top of the computer industry VP surf, and he is already spitting out a bigger load of sh*t and crap than his MS counterparts.
... well, let's see.
;-), remember you can express your opinion and change the World, Linus did, why can't you?
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Presenting this baseless attack of the GPL as an excuse to their decision is just disgusting, and me thinks that for them it will be spitting upwards.
I just feel sorry for the great people at Sun, since all this corporate crap (as opposed to real involvement like SGI) will only tarnish the image of Sun under the "new" recently raised microscopes. Of course, they think that a lot of computer users/whatever do not think (or for that matter know what it is) that GPL based OSS is great, and that they can get away with it
kudos to the smart open thinking people at Sun reading this
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I'd prefer a MPL or LGPL on the filters. Like BSDL, it would still allow the filters to be used in proprietary products, but changes would have to be made public.
NPL or GPL would also be a good choice for the rest of the product, it would give Sun the extra rights I feel they would deserve, but still be an open source project.
I agree, getting the proprietary office packages involved would be good in this situation. That is why I wrote MPL and LGPL, rather than GPL.
Both the MPL and LGPL can be used in closed source products. Only the filter code itself would have to rermain free, the rest of the code in the suite could still be closed and proprietary.
I believe this would give us the optimal situation, where everybody but Microsoft cooperates in releasing Microsofts lock on the file formats.
> The next version of gcc, or any other software
> which has had its copyrights transfered to the
> FSF, could be released under fee-licensing
> only.
That happens not to be the case, unless the FSF rewrote all contributed code. When you contribute code to the FSF, you get in return a signed contract, which basically states that the FSF must only use the code in free software. If the FSF releases a gcc under a fee-license only, they would be breaking hundreds of such contracts.
Sun's stated goal is to challenge MSOffice on the desktop now and to remove Windows latter. ( Star Portal ). However with the cards stacked as they are ( MSOffice on the vast majority of desktops and most users thinking *.doc is a standard file format ) no single Office suite can ever hope to put a serious dent in that position.
They way to make an impact is to put the Import/Export filters under a BSD stile license and hope that a community grows around them. In other words reduce *.doc and *.xls to mear commodities ( Like *.html and *.txt ).
Too bad they are as big on control as MS is and as such can never gain the foothold MS has now. Think back to 198x. Do you think IBM could have pushed it's PCs all over Commodore, Apple and everybody else without help from Compaq and the rest of cloners ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL.
The GPL is as legally binding as Microsoft's EULA.
By violating the license, you've violated the copyright on the code. The party that can sue you is the copyright holder (typically the author in a GPL case, although the FSF also holds a lot of the copyrights).
The damages they can seek differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but would generally be based on how much revenue you made from their code (since it is unlikely that they lost revenue). You could also face criminal charges under certain circumstances.
There are already provisions for lawsuits involving nationals of differing nations under the Universal Copyright Convention and various other international treaties (Pan-American, etc.) that include almost every nation in which you could make money selling commercial software.
Sun, however, needs to turn a profit. This can be done only if they keep property of their product.
This is one thing that confuses me about Sun's behavior as of late. I think they're a hardware company. They think they're a software company, I guess.
The question they should be asking is, "Are people buying our nice & expensive hardware to get Solaris, or are they getting Solaris when they buy our nice & expensive hardware?"
It makes a big difference.
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QDMerge 0.4 just released!
how to invest, a novice's guide
One of the side effects of using SCLS as the licensing terms is that people from some countries are not allowed to download the code. As you can see when you check the link above, they want to enforce their IP, thus, you don't have to wonder they don't feel like using GPL.
1. The argument is that [with SCSL] the [open source] community makes Sun rich. Well, the community makes Red Hat rich -- no community member has really joined in that.
- The argument isn't that the community makes sun rich, the argument is that the community makes sun rich without getting something back other than bugfixes or features sun should have delivered anyway, and with no guarantee how long the developer will be able to see the source in the future. In contrast redhat has in no way total influence to the linux kernel or other gpl'ed software they put on their dist, so when redhats future plans differ from the communities regarding the software, redhat looses. And redhat (and suse and others) activly contribute code under the same license back to the community. To summarize, redhat and suse etc. help the community without drawbacks while sun does not.
2. Sun, as a commercial company whose products include intellectual property licensed from multiple sources, needs that control, because it's completely impossible to give away the whole lot without the agreement of everybody who actually owns it.- Just showing the source code has this problems too, this point is void. In addition, everybody (at least I) would understand sun holding back portions of the source which they don't own or even just don't want to license under (l)gpl, as long as it doesn't violate the free license. Look at the interview with John Carmack, sun.
3. "One big problem with GPL is that it's hard to give the customer indemnification and product warranties." So long as open source software really is open source then this oughtn't to be much of a problem, but where are the guarantees that it is? "You can submit source that's been stolen," he says.- huh? I can contribute stolen code under the SCSL too, can't I. The only way to prevent this is not to accept source from the outside, so better stay closed, sun. And wouldn't letting the copyright in the hands of the contributor assure his liability of said code? IANAL, but wouldn't it be possible to use the GPL and force a contributer to sign a kind of guarantee for the code's legality if this code is included in the "offical" star office distribution?
4. So long as it isn't possible to sure about all of the ownership of the code, it's foolhardy for suppliers to give customers guarantees and indemnities about it.- This is completly bogus, IMO. Thanks to today's patent chaos, no one can be really sure to buy a software or hardware which is completly safe from coming under fire by an patent imfringement lawsuit. How many gif creation tools are out there, and I bet there are many commercial closed source products, whose use for gif creation is illegal. If I remember correctly, apple sued microsoft for windows copiing MACos, nvidia had some lawsuits, netscape and so on.
I for one would be thankfull if someone from sun would have the guts to tell us: "If we use the GPL now and want to change our mind (and our license) in a year or two, we are screwed cause people could just fork off the latest gpl'ed version and compete with us."> If Sun doesn't want to be an open source player it's fine with me.
Me too. They bought it; now they can sell it, give it away, or flush it down the toilet. All lie within their rights.
It just amuses me to see companies try to get the advantages of OSS without letting go of the reins. As if "Open Source" were a magical charm that invokes Maxwell's Daemon and compells him to help you extract work from the environment at no cost.
Yes, I suppose some Sun shops will contribute some mods and/or fixes to help make their own life easier. But even they will end up asking, after a while, "Why aren't we doing this for an OS that won't ask us to pay when we want to run it (and our own patches) on the next server we buy?"
Cathedral and Bazaar notwithstanding, I don't think the ultimate explanation of the power of OSS has been fully comprehended and explained. But whatever the explanation turns out to be, I'm pretty sure it will show that the rewards can't be reaped in fields owned by an absentee landlord.
For my money, anything less than the GPL is nothing more than a lame PR move at best, or a cynical attempt to exploit the technically adept, at worst.
So do what you please with it, Sun. But don't count on any undeserved favors to help the plan along.
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It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> I going to think about all the years I've been using MS software and never thought MS was full of haters.
If you think MS fans are any different from Linux fans, BSD fans, Mac fans, etc., then drop by comp.os.linux.advocacy and see how the MS fans behave there.
The reason you don't see much venom from MS fans on a day-to-day basis is that their market share means you're surrounded with people who agree with each other. Put them in an environment where they don't have the numbers to shout down the opposition, and they are just like everyone else: mostly well behaved, but a small percentage are complete arseholes.
> first impression of Linux...it's being supported by a bunch of hate filled jerks.
Sorry to disabuse you, but some of us despised BG and MS long before we ever heard of Linux.
If you want the world to Speak Well of Bill, then you should be urging him to behave better rather than urging us to turn a blind eye on it.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Anyone else out here a control freak?
Probably most of us are, to greater or lesser extent.
I don't think the comparison with novels is valid: a novel is a work of art, but a program is (usually) intended for functional utility.
Well, OK, a novel is really a way of making a buck, but that's not conducive to opening it up either.
As for programs? Open it up if and only if it suits your purposes. If you view it as a work of art, don't. If you view it as a perfect tool, don't. If you feel like it needs more work than you'll live to do alone, do.
Or split the difference: if you have a nifty new idea, program it up and sell it for a couple of years so you can retire well, then GPL it after the new has worn off and all the "me too" applications start showing up.
As for creative control, the OSS tradition so far has been for a program's creator to serve as the maintainer, rejecting or accepting modifications at his/her own discretion so long as s/he wishes. There's no guarantee of this, but it seems to work out pretty well as long as you stay on top of things and you aren't too rabid about rejecting truly useful contributions.
(From the other side of the coin, I submitted some code to a project and had parts of it rejected for what I think were really lame reasons, so I simply quit submitting code for it. In principle I could fork the code and "have it my way", but this would undoubtedly earn me near universal disdain among the community -- especially if I were perceived to have done so merely as a response to a perceived snub, or just to "have it my way". In practice I'm more likely to try to start a competing product from scratch than to try to "steal" someone else's product. Of course we're getting numerous enough now that some sleazebags are starting to work their way in with the idealists -- witness a certain IPO announcement from a couple of weeks back -- so it's quite possible that the sort of inhibition I'm describing here will break down in the near future.)
At any rate, a more immediate concern from your point of view might be that if you try to go it alone you'll end up being left behind by a competing product that goes the open route, with the result that your pride-of-product suffers anyway.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Sun, however, needs to turn a profit.
The question for Sun, IMO, is how long they will be turning a profit if MS swallows the whole planet.
Clearly, they should follow their own best interests. If they want to turn a profit in the short run, they should sell it rather than giving it away -- let alone GPLing it. But if (as it appears) they bought it to undercut the dominance of MSOffice, they should (IMO) GPL it an have it turned into an Office Killer within two years.
It looks to me like they're taking a middle route that will fail on both accounts.
> if you wan't to see Sun continue as a company, you should support SCSL
I neither support it nor reject it. I don't support it, because it doesn't look like they've done me any favors. I don't object to it, because it doesn't look like they're doing anything harmful.
But it doesn't look like they're doing much good, either. Not even for themselves: I'll be immensely surprised if SO increases the market share of the products they charge for.
And all the above is in addition to the fact that, as so many others have pointed out, their excuses^H^H^H^H^H^H^H reasons for not going with the GPL look like, well, excuses.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> There is absolutely NO MUSCLE (cash) Behind it.
Look what happened when some dork trademarked "Linux" in the USA a couple of years back: one law firm donated legal services to shoot it down.
IIRC.
> GPL will NOT be accepted from ANY serious company unless it was tried and tested in court that it works
I spoke to an IP lawyer a couple of weeks back, and she says it's as valid as any other way of licensing IP.
Also: Suppose Sun GPL'd something and then discovered that a rival was violating the license. Do you suppose Sun wouldn't sue and sink megabucks into it? What keeps an IT company happier than suing rivals over license violations?
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Given the variety of choices out there (Lotus, MS, Star, GOffice) does it really make sense to keep on butting heads against brick walls? The market now has a range of choices and prices ranging from free (speech), to app-rental to full office suites. There be should be enough diversity to satisfy anyone with varying prices to match. Instead, would it be better to think about areas which OpenSource and/or Linux would have a comparative advantage and be superior in the long term? Areas like scaling development environments to support thousands of contributors, perhaps automated code documentation to relieve the tedium, device transparent access (from smartcards/PDAs to server clusters). A tail chase on a commercial product is going to be long so why not instead put some energy into stuff which is more speculative and might open up interesting areas? Like having code morph to make optimal use of the local instruction set or improve its execution speed each time? While commercial groups have to look after their existing customer base, OpenSource hackers are unencumbered to explore whatever topic catches their fancy without worrying about a return on investment or keeping the shareholders doped on hype. As free agents, hackers can scout new unexplored software territory while leaving the heavyweight gorillas to fight it out in the business jungle.
LL
Dude, put down the chalupa. I agree the hardware companies like us to "buy their hardware". And this is only pushed by the fact that the software companies like us to "buy their software". Its an ever ending loop. But in all honestly at the current point the common man can't be expected to produce his own hardware. (btw do you honestly think that the personal computer would have ever came into existence in a non capitolistic society) But anyways, since we Can work together to produce software, we should produce good quality software. If this quality demands high quality hardware, then so be it. But atleast we are finally entering an age in which the slackness of programmers and the size and buggyness of their code are not the driving force in newer hardware (I think thats quake 3's job). Make good software, the hardware will follow, but all in all be patient my son. BTW your a Markist and a Leninist? Is that accually possible?
>> give the customer indemnification and product warranties
So, is he implying that under SCSL, there is warranty protection on my free downloaded copy of StarOffice? Indemnification against the possibility that some subroutine was copied from somebody else? Can I hold Sun liable if something goes wrong?
I doubt it, and thus I just don't get it. If they want to distribute Star Office just to existing Sun customers, I guess it makes sense. If they want to expand their market, and take a bite out of MSOffice, it's dumb.
Basically, what he writes about the freedom of the StarOffice source code, is just an analogy of the arguments used against freedom everywhere for as long as it has been debated. People attacking freedom always bring up the lack of security, assurance, and control.
So, of course he has a point. Or, at least he has a point that strikes a chord with people. And in the short run of course Sun has a lot to gain by keeping its code under the artificial reins offered by our screwed up legal system.
But in the long run, well, compare the progress of the (psuedo-) free world with the non-free nations.
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is here
This doesn't seem to add much of anything to the SCSL/GPL debate.
Just more excuses about product warranties being threatened when the hoi polloi get their dirty hands on the code. What if *stolen* code ends up in the product! That is more likely under GPL than SCSL for some reason?
They can't give away StarOffice because it's too hard to track down all the IP owners? Didn't they just buy it? Doesn't that require tracking down the owners too?
If Sun doesn't want to be an open source player it's fine with me. But I wish they'd quit wasting time trying to justify the SCSL license as an improvement over existing open source licenses. Show me some SCSL project successes first, please.
I guess I should be careful about the term 'proprietary'. I would agree that the only intellectual property that is not 'proprietary' in some way is public domain and GPLd software definitely is not in the public domain.
GPLd software is proprietary in a very odd way. Anyone can do anything they want with it except make derived works not covered by the GPL. There's also some positive responsibilities of someone distributing something derived from GPLd works to include the text of the license, FSF copyright notice, change history, source code to changes, or provide a pointer where the source code can be obtained, etc.
However, your assertion that the FSF could release a GPLd work, such as a modification of gcc, under fee-licensing only is not true.
Quoting from the GPL (Version 2, June 1991) full text available here:
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
Or, are you saying, as is sometimes heard, that the GPL is not legally binding and thus could be broken at whim?