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StarOffice Boss Says He Chose Sun License over GPL for Good Reasons

Posted by Roblimo on from the varying-degrees-of-code-freedom dept.

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?

2 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. BSD the filters. by Forge · · Score: 5

    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 ?
  2. Weak arguments by platypus · · Score: 5
    It's their code, they are a company, they can do whatever they want without explanation, but

    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."