Last year, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik thought Sun Microsystems’ open source-based alternative to Microsoft’s widely used Office software would encourage broader use of the Linux operating system on desktops and perhaps loosen the iron grip of Windows. But Szulik abandoned those hopes when Sun started charging for its StarOffice product and changed its way of dealing with the original equipment manufacturers, such as Red Hat, which can bundle it with their own offerings. Szulik accused Sun of adopting the domineering methods of mutual enemy Microsoft.Now, Red Hat is looking on using OpenOffice, the free, open source counterpart of Star Office, while other sources say that Red Hat might look into including into their future Linux distributions the Hancom Office instead.
In the meantime, LinuxLaboratory has published an editorial, called “Redhat Needs to Stop Whining About Sun“, where the author says that Red Hat is no better than Sun, in many ways.
heaven forbid someone make some money.
True that .. if Redhat wants a free office suite to include in their distro so bad, then they could use OpenOffice or else write their own.
I have no problems with people writing free (as in no cost, not open source) software, but why so many people think it is people’s *obligation* to release software for free is beyond me.
we should be thangful that we have openoffice.org. i think it makes sense that sun charges for staroffice. just like mozilla and netscape, mozilla(openoffice.org) is the development program, netscape(staroffice) is the finished product.
The idea of giving StarOffice away for free and releasing the source code was not to make money but to deprive MS of the ability to make money from MSOffice.
That seemed to be the plan then suddenly oops no we are going to charge for it.
Charging for StarOffice won’t work, infact no Office suite will ever sell against MS Office.
No one is going to pay for the privilige of being incompatable with most other companys.
“That seemed to be the plan then suddenly oops no we are going to charge for it.”
So, what’s the problem? This isn’t about “It’s stupid to charge for StarOffice because nobody will pay for it.”
This is about “It’s wrong to charge for StarOffice because it should be free.”
RedHat is still in business?
amazing…
Red Hat risks proving Microsoft right in their statement that Linux is a cancer.
As a so called leader in the Linux World, they should try to behave as such. They should also choose their spokes person more carefully because the person who made that statement sounds like an idiotic Linux fanatic.
Why does Red Hat charge for their boxed version of Linux?
I think Red Hat is afraid of SUN entering the Linux market and kicking their butts! They should be!
Other Linux sellers, including SuSE and MandrakeSoft, have versions of their products that include StarOffice 6.
Accroading to Suse.de, 8.0 ships with StarOffice 5.2, unless I’m way behind time and there’s Suse 8.1 or 8.2…
lemme know when the blood starts to run…looks like lots of posturing to me…
OpenOffice is a good year away, sadly, and RedHat has nowhere else to turn…it’s not exactly like paying 400 bucks for Office X for OSX and strapping your Mac to the Microsoft cross…..
maybe Red Hat should fork from OpenOffice.org and create their own version from it (they have the money.
– Make it totally GNOMEish, since they like GNOME so much. For example, use a GTK+ frontend, use Bonobo for the components and etc.
– Fork from MySQL and create a GTK+ front end to it, and make it just like Access and File Maker Pro. Integrate it into their version.
– Add in a lot of features.
– Create server side features, like a open version of SharePoint. Create something like BackOffice or of that sort. Red hat is after all a server company.
– Intergrate it into Red Hat’s version of GNOME, but make it optional. You won’t want Sun accusing you of Microsoft-like tactics.
This is great, boys and girls!
Yes, indeedy do!
My redheaded stepchildren are beating each other up and i just sit back and reap the rewards!
I’ve raised them well, have i not?
…Sun is trying to make a little bit of money of off StartOffice. Those capitalist pinko liberal communist faggots! What’s next?! Sun marketing Macs to fudge-packing web designers! When will the insanity stop!
LOL, that’s a good one!
I bet that all the people who are screaming about how products “should” be have invested zero effort into producing those products, and therefore have no right to dictate. I bet that all the people who are screaming about getting stuff for nothing, as if it were some inalienable right, demand cash money for their own goods & services.
I say they can solve their own problems. Let them get jobs and earn money, so they can pay for things they want. If they don’t want to pay, then let them roll their own solutions. If they aren’t willing to do anything other than be sitting, whining lumps, then screw them. The industry isn’t an ersatz parent! Blame mommy and daddy for shoving junior in front of the “boob tube” in lieu of giving them affection, who cares. All I know is that my efforts aren’t going to be wasted on some whiny brat.
I admire people who do things for love. And I admire those who share what they have with others. But I understand that they have the freedom to do what they like with their products. It wouldn’t be nearly so special if they had no choice! So I am grateful for what is there, and have enough sense to simply move on when things change. If I want a free product to hang around, I contribute — money, bug reports, suggestions, even simple words of encouragement.
It’s worth noting that Star Division didn’t offer Star Office as free software either. Without Sun, Open Office wouldn’t have had a chance to even get started.
You all would have put RedHat up on the altar and prayed to them just after your mass with RMS (Linus seems to be in decline, I think it is because he does what he wants and doesn’t give a damn about the linux community. I find him the most sane of them all).
Who are Red Hat kidding? They are not some kind of saints. They are just mad because Sun isn’t doing what they want (which is to give them as much as possible for free, so they can sell it themselves). Redhat is by far the worst linux distribution, and I wish that Compaq could find a better distro to include with their servers (install something else? Would you risk that in a company setting?)
John
I don’t mind Sun’s actions; but McNealy announced that StarOffice is forever free – next thing you know, it’s not only propeitary, but $75 (yes, i know there is OpenOffice.org – but OpenOffice.org isn’t StarOffice, and McNealy didn’t say at LinuxWorld “OpenOffice.org would be forever free, no?)
Plus, they have been flaming Microsoft for their business plans (which I have relatively little objections), but then it starts following that same business strategies…
I don’t mind Sun charging for StarOffice and having restictive OEM deals – as long they don’t make promises they don’t keep, and critize business acts they themselves copy.
(Okay, end ranting here, rajan.)
Who are Red Hat kidding? They are not some kind of saints. They are just mad because Sun isn’t doing what they want (which is to give them as much as possible for free, so they can sell it themselves). Redhat is by far the worst linux distribution, and I wish that Compaq could find a better distro to include with their servers (install something else? Would you risk that in a company setting?)
For servers, Red Hat is the most polished distribution out there, with a profitable non-bankrupting company behind it. I think Compaq (which is HP now) is smart. Maybe they should follow IBM’s strategy….
Sun is a hypocrite, but then, I respect their business strategy. But as for their PR, it is way low.
StarOffice and Openoffice share the codebase
the fact they charge it for some task (not that for student, teachers and so on is completely free)
OpenOffice is just great and I’m using it even if I’m a student.I don’t need database ^^
anyway the idea of gnomify OO and add feature is appealing but not easly feasible
I suspect Red Hat’s really making noise about this because Sun’s planning to make their Linux distribution, and Red Hat suspects that this will present the most serious competition anyone’s mounted against them for “enterprise Linux” customers. Even at big companies, Linux use is driven primarily by engineering and sysadmin geeks–and Red Hat has always used their support of the GPL as a PR tactic with that crowd. That’s enabled them to fend off attacks from ostensibly more business-oriented Linux distributions in the past.
With Sun in that field, though, suddenly there’s a name that managers know in the Linux game, potentially with an existing network of long-established resellers and support personnel behind it. Sun hasn’t really warmed the hearts of free software lovers, but for Unix credibility in the enterprise, they’re about at the top of the heap. No Linux distribution has ever carried that kind of weight. Sun starts out with an advantage that Red Hat’s spent years trying to build up.
So this is a preemptive PR strike targeted at the free software geeks that populate a lot of engineering departments–the people whose persistence is ultimately responsible for the substantial inroads in the corporate world Linux has made–reminding them that Red Hat is their buddy and Sun isn’t.
This really isn’t about whether StarOffice is free; Sun is doing what makes sense to appease business customers who demand to pay for products in exchange for someone official to yell at when they have problems. OpenOffice fulfills Sun’s promise to have a free StarOffice. If you get past the marketing tactic of having two names for the same product, this is essentially the same strategy that Red Hat’s been using for years. And Red Hat knows it.
anyway the idea of gnomify OO and add feature is appealing but not easly feasible
It is actually quite feasible. First, fork OpenOffice.org. Then create a GTK+ front end. Then you start tweaking the parts below to get rid of redundant code. And then you add in a good spell checker (sorry, OO, but it suck), a grammar checker, a MySQL front end, some Asian Fonts, some quality clipart, integration with Evolution and other apps, server side software – who knows, we might have a Staroffice killer! (and I’ll bet to you that the GTK+ version would be much faster than the original version; at least on GNOME)
“I suspect Red Hat’s really making noise about this because Sun’s planning to make their Linux distribution, and Red Hat suspects that this will present the most serious competition anyone’s mounted against them for “enterprise Linux” customers.”
I suspect you are exactly right. Red Hat is upset that Sun decided to make their own Linux distro instead of jump on the Red Hat bandwagon like most other hardware vendors… Which brings up an interesting point… Who’s using Microsoft tactics? After all, what Red Hat is really upset about is that Sun will be using a Linux distro that is not Red Hat.
As far as it providing competition, it will provide more than that. I am sure Red Hat is scared to death of Sun Linux. If we are honest with ourselves, Linux is not really a mainsteam presense in the enterprise yet. However, when that changes, and enterprises do want Linux, they are going to be far more likely go with Sun than with Red Hat. After all, the typical enterprise has been dealing with Sun with years and years. Sun is a stable commercial company that is not going anywhere and that they are familiar with. Red Hat is going to have an extremely tough sell to lure enterprise customers given that Sun has over 70% of the Fortune 1000 high end server market.
Do you think an office-suite will be successful if _we_ (yes, those geeky techies 😉 ) use it? No! It will only succeed if enterprises start adopting it. And that is the problem.
They just don’t believe that sun will continue an office-suite which takes much time and money to be developed and then is given away for free. Sun _had_ to charge money, otherway no big enterprise would take it (yes, it sounds confusing to us, but that’s true and at least for me understandeble).
And be honest, openoffice IS staroffice without some commercial things like grammar and spellchecking.
afeter all as you can read here [ http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/zd/20020531/tc_zd/92… ] redhat has started to apply for software patents and while allowing opensource implementaitions they have excluded the BSD license. With RedHat always claimeing that they are the protectors of OSS or some such drivel they should if they must have any patents do so only to prvent some closed source vendor patenting it and so hurting OSS.
“And be honest, openoffice IS staroffice without some commercial things like grammar and spellchecking.
”
Actually, OpenOffice does have a spell checker. But it doesn’t have a dictionary. AFAIK, StarOffice doesn’t have a grammer checker either. It does have a dictionary though.
Probably the biggest thing that OpenOffice is missing that you get with StarOffice is the limited version of Adabase-D. An “end user” accessible desktop database is the one area where Linux office applications are really lacking. There are no Approach/Access/File Maker type products for Linux at this point.
Oops… My last post was supposed to be a reply to Magus’s post. Not Anonymous’s post.
men i just arrived to the geneve airport and the first thing i do is reading osnews. they have here sun microsistems solaris terminals. this is CRAP.
fonts are unreadable small, i changed a while ago but they are back to lilliputs size.
X crap aside, StarOffice is cool, looks like they have lost their cool at redhat.
off to visit switzerland, wish me a good time, girlfriend is coming so i bet im going to have it
afeter all as you can read here [ http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/zd/20020531/tc_zd/92… ] redhat has started to apply for software patents and while allowing opensource implementaitions they have excluded the BSD license. With RedHat always claimeing that they are the protectors of OSS or some such drivel they should if they must have any patents do so only to prvent some closed source vendor patenting it and so hurting OSS.
They may be hypocritic, but they are smart. Firstly, if they already have an implementation of it, no one else can patent it, so it’s a quite lame excuse. However, it’s a smart decission. Firstly, by allowing implementation in an copyleft license, no closed source company can implement it. So, when, just say Microsoft, want to use Red Hat’s patents (just say its collections grows), they could request the usage of Microsoft’s patents without royalty, and maybe some favours, or porting some apps… So one day, Red Hat could be the only Linux company with Office for it, and ClearType fonts…
Really, I wouldn’t hate Sun and Red Hat so much if they actually practice what they preach, which they don’t…
It seems logical that a commercial enterprise cannot indefinitely support a product without earning a return on it.
If SUN is about to push into the commercial market with its own Linux distro + StarOffice, then bring it on.
Open source can only benefit by more and more businesses using office suites that support open standards.
why are sun using Linux when they have a x86 UNIX.
It’s just flipping daft.
why are sun using Linux when they have a x86 UNIX.
1. Sun makes its money by selling hardware. Sun doesn’t make any money when someone else sells an IA-32 box. Sun doesn’t make any money giving away Solaris IA-32, which is what the market has decided it’s worth. So there’s no profit in Solaris IA-32.
2. Sun bought Cobalt, and Cobalt uses Linux. Sun has to support past and current Cobalt systems at the very least, so Sun is in the Linux business whether they like it or not. As long as they have to go that far, why not go the last two inches and release a Sun-blessed Linux distro?
3. PCs running Linux are eating Sun’s lunch in many areas that were traditional Sun bastions, like web services. They have to do something about that! If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
4. The number of production IA-32 Solaris systems is practically nil. It costs a lot of money to put out a full IA-32 port that’s worthy of the Solaris name, not to mention the UNIX name! Sun could save a lot of money by dropping Solaris IA-32. And for those who still want something Sun to run on their PCs, Sun can cheaply offer Linux as a consolation prize.
So what were you saying about being daft?