According to a heise article, free versions of Star Office will now only be available to Solaris users. Free versions for Linux and Windows users will no longer be offered. However, Mark McLoughlin of Sun mailed the gnome-hackers mailing-list announcing the deal between Sun, Ximian and Wipro. The deal means that Wipro will assign up to 50 people to work on GNOME including hackers, QA people, documenters and more.
Sun to Charge for Star Office but Increases Commitment to GNOME
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I think it’s quite sad that the free versions of staroffice are no longer going to be available.
I also think that it’s quite good that they are concentrating their efforts on GNOME, i hope they don’t burn their little coding fingers to a crisp over the whole GNOME/MONO issue.
Oh well, i have a solaris/intel box set up at home, so i’ll still be able do get soffice
btw eug, u looking for a host/mirror somewhere ? i can set up a box at work … i think i could do it for free too …
drop me a line.
Take Care
Kevin
Hopefully they didn’t overcharged as what have been done by M$. By the way, I think I’ll stick to OpenOffice fot the time being.
Well,
fine, so Gobe might jump into the hole with their GP 3.0/linux. So far, I’m quite happy with it running on windoze. I’ve never liked SO (or any office clone) anyway
Call me mad, but I think this is probably a good move. By having it cost something, development can be legitimately funded and the customer perception profile raised. When something is free, people often think that it’s not as good as something that one pays for – a consumer mentality.
P
I’m confused here. Isn’t StarOffice the same as OpenOffice, just that OpenOffice is open-sourced? What’s being pulled then, the older StarOffice while the newer OpenOffice is still going to be available? Or am I confused about things?
Okay, here’s the deal:
Around October 2000, Sun relicensed most of StarOffice so that it was covered by the GPL. The parts which wern’t relicensed had been licensed from other companies (i.e. Sun didn’t own them). The GPL portion became OpenOffice.org (you need to put the “.org” on the end because “OpenOffice” is copyrighted by someone else). Since then, the original code has been significantly modified and expanded, with some parts being completely rewritten.
Sun, who still own the copyright to the code, are entitled to relicense OpenOffice.org under another license if they so wish. They intend to do this with OpenOffice.org, by adding proprietary extensions and calling it “StarOffice 6.0”. This relationship is not unlike the Mozilla/Netscape association. Like Mozilla/Netscape, the proproietary version (in this case, StarOffice) has little extra to offer over the GPLed original other than some extra polish.
SO = OO + enhancements > sold to who prefers commercial software, free with Solaris.
OO = Free
That explains everything. Thanks!
Sun is probably doing this because there are still a lot of big corporations whose policies will not allow them to use free software. The big corporations want to pay someone for the software so that they can have someone to yell at or sue if they encounter problems.So Sun is being very smart by targeting both the corp and non-corp users.
I’d like to know just how many times and by what corporations M$ has been sued. Last time I read the EULA, M$ absolves itself from anything and everything that could possibly happen while using their crappy software. To me, the arguement that companies don’t use freesoftware because they can’t sue is absolute and total BS.
I was an avid fan of star office 6.0 Beta it finally removed that god awful explorer interface and split up the program, I have to say that i never used 5.2 though it was installed for a long period of time.
I bought a copy of Productive as soon as it came out and the only feature I miss from Star Office is the equation editior, as i type a lot of equations.
This can only benefit Gobe who seem comitted to continually improving the product, who knows maybe I will get my equation editor soon.
It also puts Abiword in a *much* stronger position. I always wondered what place abiword had in the scheme of things as it was very much under powered and unstable in comparison to star office.
I would still like to see star office continue to develop so hopefully the charge will be a nominal one and the money will go to providing us with a stronger, more powerful package.
It may be BS but that is just the way the pointy-haired managers think. I believe they call it C-Y-A.
I’m still a bit puzzled over the licensing though. Once you license something as GPL does it not become the general public’s property? Could Linus come and change Linux to use another license? If so i find that wrong. I think that once something is released under GPL it should have to remain GPL.
Software can have multiple licenses, at the discretion of the copyright holder. OpenOffice is GPL, but Sun (the copyright holder) has decided to make a proprietary license so that they can use it for StarOffice. The same goes for Mozilla and QT.
So, just what are the enhancements in Star compared to Open ?
Enough to be worth paying for ?
Ok it’s only my feeling but since Star Officce was made
available it has only now started to attract attention with newbies. This is not the time to discontinue the free versions for Windows, leave it be for now it is starting to hurt Microsoft in the Windows world.
Ok so don’t BLAST us for our feeling.