Caolan McNamara wrote:
On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 12:48 -0400, Allen Pulsifer wrote:
The one rational Simon offers that is a little bit different than the usual
is the following:
"In many cases (including some very well-known open source projects) [the
JCA] also allows the original donor to offer commercial offerings, thus
ensuring the project continues to have engagement funded by its major
participants."
What might be concerning Sun is that a foundation owning the copyright
to OOo code, even one that has an explicit mechanism to allow major
contributors to continue to make commercial closed source versions of
OOo, would probably remove the ability of Sun to unilaterally
sub-licence StarOffice under a proprietary license to other
co-operations either for profit or as a major bargaining chip for the
promotion of other products.
well making some profit with OpenOffice.org or a product based on
OpenOffice.org is really helpful to pay all the developers on the
project ;-) I don't know the details, i assume Sun spend more money on
the project than they make profit with StarOffice. It's better that i
don't know the details otherwise i would might be looking for a new job
because i couldn't be sure that my job is safe.
Ok i am joking i know that Sun does not simply claim that they are
believe in open source and that they are committed to the OpenOffice.org
project and other open source projects as well.
Anyway but Sun is not the only company that is making profit (or not)
with a product based on OpenOffice.org.
Sun does it with StarOffice where everybody can see the 1:1 relation
between both products. There are other products/brands like Oxygenoffice
or EuroOffice where the office might be free but the brand is used to
bring it in relation to companies that want to sell some
services/extensions around the product. That's fine but should be taken
into account. RedFlag has it's own brand in China -> again a clear 1:1
relation.
Novell makes profit with there Desktop product and oh wonder the main
application that make the whole product interesting is what?
*OpenOffice.org* correct. I agree that it is no 1:1 relation and maybe
that is the reason why i always and only hear Sun is making money with
StarOffice. A further example is IBM with LotusNotes or Symphony where
you also can't see a 1:1 relation as well.
I am not sure how often RedHat Linux is used and sold on the Desktop.
But again OpenOffice.org is probably a key selling point for Desktop users.
There are probably more and that's fine because every brand helps to
promote the office suite and of course our OpenDocument format.
The second point you have mentioned is the promotion of other products.
I assume that you mean the Google bundling of StarOffice with their
Google desktop (or something else?). Google had probably there reasons
why they wanted StarOffice and not OpenOffice.org. Anyway it's not so
important from my point of view. Important and really cool is that we
can reach a lot of potential new users of StarOffice. And as i mentioned
before, every StarOffice user helps to promote OpenDocument or at least
come in touch with it and see that alternatives to MS exists. From my
point of view it's cool when products can benefit from each other. And i
personally would like to see more of these collaborations independent of
they are based on StarOffice or OpenOffice.org or another brand. No that
is not 100% correct, i would like to see more based on OpenOffice.org
because it's the most popular brand ;-)
Juergen
C.
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