Rod Engelsman wrote: <snipped>
> Here we have a corporation that acquires a major piece of intellectual > property -- an office productivity suite, changes the liscencing to > GPL and hands it over to the open-source community. > > If that's all they ever did, it would be the single greatest gift to > FOSS ever, right up there with the Netscape gift of Mozilla. > > But that's not all. This corporation then devotes dozens of > programmers to the task of updating and improving this property over a > period of years. Hosts the website that distributes it to outside > developers and users. Actively promotes it, even though it directly > competes with a proprietary version of the same software that they sell. > > Only fly in the ointment is that some small parts of the code are > dependent on a proprietary, though freely distributed, software that > this same company owns. > > Let's get real, just how pure does a company have to be to be seen as > one of the good guys? There's a real limit to how much they can get > away with in furtherance of this experimental strategy. > I wouldn't be so quick to paint a picture of Sun as a champion of all that is good. Sun is a company - a commercial entity - and as such, thinks in the same terms as all other companies, eg "How do I make more money? How do I destroy the competition? How do I create a need for my products?" Sun's decision to open-source StarOffice was unconventional, but was still a decision very much based on the above questions. It was by no means made because Sun wanted to do something *good*, simply for the sake of being a good citizen. There are *individuals* in companies that would argue for doing something good simply for the sake of being a good citizen, but this nobility does not apply to corporations. Period. Whatever reasons Sun had for open-sourcing StarOffice, they all point back to making money, not being nice. OpenOffice is most certainly not a *gift*, but a *strategy*. Keep in mind that there are other companies who make money from open source software - MySQL for example. In Sun's case, I'd say that they made a very wise *commercial* decision to open source StarOffice. Sun have betrayed the open source community at many critical points. Sun and Microsoft have been in bed for quite a while. I remember not long ago a story on Slashdot on a deal between Sun and Microsoft that they would not sue each other into oblivion over patent infringments. StarOffice was specifically mentioned in the agreement; OpenOffice was not. This seems more than a little suspicious. I can vaguely remember other examples of Sun and Microsoft and behind-closed-doors type stuff, but if people are interested, they can google for it ... I also remember that Sun bought into SCO's Linux licensing scam. Surely they could have at least sat on the fence with everyone else? But no, they start making public statements designed specifically to attract companies scared by the SCO licensing scam away from Linux and towards their own offerings. That's a little unethical. > As someone else pointed out, if the parts of OOo that depend on Java > bother you that much, then re-write the freakin' things in C++. Start > a fork if you *really* feel the need. Yes. Bring on the forks, I say :) > I wish people could reserve their criticism for companies that are > actually *opposed* to open-source software instead of banging on the > good guys for not being pure enough. Unfortunately there is no such thing as 'pure enough'. You're either pure or you're not. While that might seem elitist, it's simply fact. The 'rules' are clear and if you don't follow them, then you're not open source. I'll also point out once more that while Sun might be leveraging open source to it's advantage now, that I would certainly not see this as a life-long committment. They're happy enough with they way things are currently. If the open source community identifies threats such as this 'minor impurity' and acts upon it now, we can protect ourselves from trouble further down the track *when* Sun decides they've had enough competition from open source. Dan -- Daniel Kasak IT Developer NUS Consulting Group Level 5, 77 Pacific Highway North Sydney, NSW, Australia 2060 T: (+61) 2 9922-7676 / F: (+61) 2 9922 7989 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] website: http://www.nusconsulting.com.au --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
