It should also be ntoed that according to Be's own Financial Disclosure Intel owns 8.43% of Be and has "certain board representation rights" as a result of the arangement that granted the stock.
I read the paragraph on page B4 of the WSJ and it says that an announcement will be made Tuesday, so hopefully we will learn more then. It also looks like the blurb may only be available in WSJ's pay section. I thought of posting my thoughts on this in response to the earlier Freshmeat article responding to the Open Letter to Red Hat, but they make more sense here.
An open source office suite like KOffice or Gnome Office does not attack the real issue.
The first priority should be a cross-platform Office Suite. An Office suite just for Linux doesn't instantly make people switch to Linux instead of Windows. Applix, Wordperfect, and StarOffice already exist and the defection has not occurred. We can all complain about how much these Suites suck, but MS Office sucks too. People will put up with the pain if the gains are worth it. It worries me a bit that SUN is now in control of the most platform independent Office Suite and they have a vested interest in one of the platforms. StarOffice needs to be ported to Mac (the second most popular desktop OS). They used to promise it on their web pages but after months of non-delivery it disappeared without notice. I am an ASIC engineer and in my field you often end up with the marketing and sales people on Windows boxes and the engineers on UNIX boxes having to fight through Word DOC email. I love UNIX and would love to have it on my desktop, but that doesn't mean that I think we should put UNIX on all of the marketing departments machines. People should be able to choose their platform and I think an Office Suite that empowers this will be rewarded. Right now people in our office can't even use Mac if they want to, because MS Office doesn't interoperate very well.
The Suite must start out as Word DOC compatible or noone will care. Even if my company switches to StarOffice our customers will still send us files in Word format and only be able to read Word format. Fortunately switching DOC formats hurt MS so bad that Office 2000 is compatible with '97, SUN should take advantage of this extra time to make document exchange perfect.
SUN should try and work with WordPerfect and Applix to create an open document format that all Office Suites agree on. This won't be perfect, but at least as an open standard they should be able to read each others formats. SUN will not succeed if they let MS control the file format, and SUN should be smart enough to realize that they should not try to take on MS with the same proprietary attitude.
I hope that SUN understands that this is the best way to attack MS. AFAIK MS makes more money on their Office suite than on their OS. Star used to give Office away to non-commercial users, and they were far from pulling in one-tenth of what MS was. However much money SUN might make on StarOffice won't make a dent in their bottom line. However providing an OfficeSuite to any platform will encourage more people to use more SUN products, where they can actually make the money (Java licenses, Solaris sales, and workstations). If SUN wants to make money off of StarOffice they should not let that get in the way of making it open source. Do not try to take on MS on their own terms; in this case selling a proprietary Office Suite.
The two most important Applications for any desktop OS today are a browser and an Office Suite. With Mozilla and StarOffice maybe we will finally have a chance to have people give *nix a try.
A lot of people have been disappointed by the Open Source community response to Mozilla, however I think the problem has been that when Mozilla started their codebase sucked. The project made the correct decision to rewrite everything, but until I can hack on the same code I use on a daily basis I probably won't contribute any code, the itch isn't there. If StarOffice is actually decent code and SUN doesn't piss of the OpenSource people too much, maybe they will see a greater response than Mozilla. Equally as likely is that the code blows as much as Netscape 4.x and there will be a transition period similar to Mozilla that SUN will have to be tolerant through.
PS Other people have commented on the SCSL. I don't know much about this so I won't speak directly on it; except to say that I'm not a big fan of the GPL and "GPL or else" campaigns. GPL is not that great for companies, something more like the license Mozilla is under would make more sense and hopefully still make the community happy.
You should be able to right-click on the title-bar of every app and have some application specfic menus available. Or even better, you should be able to do this on a taskbar tab.
Look at xterm; it doesn't need a menu bar (like kterm) but it has some useful menus that it puts under a control click. Instead the app should be able to tell the GUI "hey, I have some menus" and the GUI could display them when appropriate. Then I could click on the title bar, an icon, or a taskbar tab and get options for that app.
There are a couple of apps that do this under Windows and it is nice (CRT is one).
I was encouraged by the buzz about Opera over a year ago, when Netscape was looking increasingly bloated and Microsoft was, well Microsoft.
But with Opera's choice of making their browser MDI (Multiple Document Interface: meaning one father window contains all of the daughter windows) they have made it a product I don't want to use.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love a nice browser for Linux; but IMHO MDI is not "nice". Give me an SDI option and I will gladly check it out, and pay $$ if I like it.
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It should also be ntoed that according to Be's own Financial Disclosure Intel owns 8.43% of Be and has "certain board representation rights" as a result of the arangement that granted the stock.
I thought of posting my thoughts on this in response to the earlier Freshmeat article responding to the Open Letter to Red Hat, but they make more sense here.
An open source office suite like KOffice or Gnome Office does not attack the real issue.
- The first priority should be a cross-platform Office Suite. An Office suite just for Linux doesn't instantly make people switch to Linux instead of Windows. Applix, Wordperfect, and StarOffice already exist and the defection has not occurred. We can all complain about how much these Suites suck, but MS Office sucks too. People will put up with the pain if the gains are worth it. It worries me a bit that SUN is now in control of the most platform independent Office Suite and they have a vested interest in one of the platforms. StarOffice needs to be ported to Mac (the second most popular desktop OS). They used to promise it on their web pages but after months of non-delivery it disappeared without notice.
- The Suite must start out as Word DOC compatible or noone will care. Even if my company switches to StarOffice our customers will still send us files in Word format and only be able to read Word format. Fortunately switching DOC formats hurt MS so bad that Office 2000 is compatible with '97, SUN should take advantage of this extra time to make document exchange perfect.
- SUN should try and work with WordPerfect and Applix to create an open document format that all Office Suites agree on. This won't be perfect, but at least as an open standard they should be able to read each others formats. SUN will not succeed if they let MS control the file format, and SUN should be smart enough to realize that they should not try to take on MS with the same proprietary attitude.
- I hope that SUN understands that this is the best way to attack MS. AFAIK MS makes more money on their Office suite than on their OS. Star used to give Office away to non-commercial users, and they were far from pulling in one-tenth of what MS was. However much money SUN might make on StarOffice won't make a dent in their bottom line. However providing an OfficeSuite to any platform will encourage more people to use more SUN products, where they can actually make the money (Java licenses, Solaris sales, and workstations). If SUN wants to make money off of StarOffice they should not let that get in the way of making it open source. Do not try to take on MS on their own terms; in this case selling a proprietary Office Suite.
- The two most important Applications for any desktop OS today are a browser and an Office Suite. With Mozilla and StarOffice maybe we will finally have a chance to have people give *nix a try.
- A lot of people have been disappointed by the Open Source community response to Mozilla, however I think the problem has been that when Mozilla started their codebase sucked. The project made the correct decision to rewrite everything, but until I can hack on the same code I use on a daily basis I probably won't contribute any code, the itch isn't there. If StarOffice is actually decent code and SUN doesn't piss of the OpenSource people too much, maybe they will see a greater response than Mozilla. Equally as likely is that the code blows as much as Netscape 4.x and there will be a transition period similar to Mozilla that SUN will have to be tolerant through.
PS Other people have commented on the SCSL. I don't know much about this so I won't speak directly on it; except to say that I'm not a big fan of the GPL and "GPL or else" campaigns. GPL is not that great for companies, something more like the license Mozilla is under would make more sense and hopefully still make the community happy.I am an ASIC engineer and in my field you often end up with the marketing and sales people on Windows boxes and the engineers on UNIX boxes having to fight through Word DOC email. I love UNIX and would love to have it on my desktop, but that doesn't mean that I think we should put UNIX on all of the marketing departments machines. People should be able to choose their platform and I think an Office Suite that empowers this will be rewarded. Right now people in our office can't even use Mac if they want to, because MS Office doesn't interoperate very well.
You should be able to right-click on the title-bar of every app and have some application specfic menus available. Or even better, you should be able to do this on a taskbar tab.
Look at xterm; it doesn't need a menu bar (like kterm) but it has some useful menus that it puts under a control click. Instead the app should be able to tell the GUI "hey, I have some menus" and the GUI could display them when appropriate. Then I could click on the title bar, an icon, or a taskbar tab and get options for that app.
There are a couple of apps that do this under Windows and it is nice (CRT is one).
I was encouraged by the buzz about Opera over a year ago, when Netscape was looking increasingly bloated and Microsoft was, well Microsoft.
But with Opera's choice of making their browser MDI (Multiple Document Interface: meaning one father window contains all of the daughter windows) they have made it a product I don't want to use.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love a nice browser for Linux; but IMHO MDI is not "nice". Give me an SDI option and I will gladly check it out, and pay $$ if I like it.