Hi, Contrary to popular believe there are still some major differences between OpenOffice and the StarOffice code base. StarOffice has closed source bits around MS Office translation and printer support that are absent in OpenOffice. I've found that StarOffice is better with MS compatibility than OpenOffice. So there are still good reasons for buying StarOffice, which is still hands down cheaper than MS Office. What I find troublesome with a lot of these open source projects is that it takes contributions from commercial companies to keep these projects moving and somehow the open source community treats them like dirt. That's not to say that commercial companies are great at interacting with open source projects, look at how things turned out between Oracle and the OpenSolaris community. But at the end of the day, there is not such thing as a free lunch and the Stallman cool-aide drinkers will have to grow up one day just as much as the commercial companies have to learn to communicate and collaborate.
Open source is great for developers and users. But when it comes to quality, you need good development processes, funding, and architectural direction. These are things most open source communities lack the ability to facilitate. Even Linux is at the mercy of fixes and enhancements from commercial companies (Oracle, Red Hat, Novell, IBM, HP, etc.) to make it work as expected. OpenOffice will continue to be dependent upon Oracle in some shape or form. Just think about when the next MS format comes out and makes OpenOffice incompatible. Who is going to fix that? MS? At the same time, commercial companies that release open source code are dependent upon open source developers and users for feedback and finding bugs in the wild before a commercial release. So it's really a two way street. So really the open source community and the commercial companies need each other equally. As for Oracle, they still have a lot to learn from Sun and the open source community. Sun was great at developing technology and open sourcing it for everyone to re-use. But at the same time, Sun has a lot to learn from Oracle about how to turn a profit from all its IP. If Sun had a better business model around its software, it would still be around. I think the open source community has to keep pushing Oracle in the right direction, but not act so sophomoric about it. *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Octave J. Orgeron Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com E-Mail: unixcons...@yahoo.com *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* ----- Original Message ---- From: Calum Benson <calum.ben...@oracle.com> To: W. Wayne Liauh <w...@hawaiilinux.org> Cc: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org Sent: Thu, September 30, 2010 9:45:56 AM Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] : - ( On 30 Sep 2010, at 02:44, W. Wayne Liauh wrote: > > I don't know if anyone has mentioned this, but the update 9 of Solaris 10 has >finally switched to OpenOffice.org. Thus, it seems that Oracle also silently >RIP'd StarOffice (actually the decision was already made during Sun's time). > IIRC, Sun simply decided that it didn't make business sense to give away a non-free (as in beer) product, i.e. StarOffice, with a freely-downloadable product, i.e. Solaris 10. StarOffice, now called Oracle Open Office, never went away, and is still available to buy: <http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/open-office/index.html> Cheeri, Calum. -- CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer Oracle Corporation Ireland Ltd. mailto:calum.ben...@oracle.com Solaris Desktop Team http://blogs.sun.com/calum +353 1 819 9771 Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Oracle Corp. _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org