I wouldn't be so quick to paint a picture of Sun as a champion of all
that is good.
I never said that it was.
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?"
Yep, yep.
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*.
It can be both, they're not mutually exclusive. For instance, you see a lot of corporations that contribute funds to charitable orgs. This is both a gift and a strategy. The strategy part is an attempt to bolster the public image of the company. From the stand-point of the recipient, the motivation is secondary.
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.
That's yet to be seen. Have they made a profit on SO? Has OOo/SO severely eroded MS's installed base and revenues? Will this happen?
Sun have betrayed the open source community at many critical points.
You can only betray something or someone if you've made a commitment to them. Twenty years ago I made a commitment to "love and honor... yadda, yadda... till death do us part" a particular woman. There are many ways that I could potentially betray her and that commitment. I have made no such commitment to the woman that lives next door. So while I could do many nasty things to her, none of those things could be described as "betrayal" simply due to the lack of such commitment.
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 could spend the rest of my life googling for conspiracy theories, but that doesn't make them true.
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.
Makes perfect business sense to me. After all, they do offer a competing product, Solaris, which they wish to promote. Have they ever made a public commitment to support Linux? If not, then where is the ethics problem?
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.
So does your criticism then apply to Redhat, SuSe, MySQL, or any other company that mixes open and proprietary business?
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.
The worst that Sun could do would be to simply stop supporting OpenOffice.org. They could shut down the website and re-assign their developers. But the code would remain regardless. That's the part of all this that's a gift, no matter what their intentions may be.
Rod
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