On 02/05/2012 10:26 PM, geoffrey mendelson wrote:
On Feb 5, 2012, at 10:02 PM, Boaz Rymland wrote:
yuck!
So it was ok for SUN to buy StarOffice and give it away in order to
reduce MS/Office sales?
OpenOffice's free price and open source was a marketing tool too.
Bad because it's "dumping", a practice banned by the WTO? I'm somewhat
skeptic about the validity of an argument that it gives an unfair
advantage to the side that does not intend to sell their product, but to
give it away for free. The side being the OO developer community. Of
course, for Sun it's a tactic to undermine the MS profit stream, I
agree. However, in case when, if not by intention, but by result it
aligns surprisingly well with the direction large companies rarely take
-- the benefit of all (literate) mankind, I don't mind at all.
Before you go "you must be anti FOSS" on me, bear in mind there were
many true FOSS office type products (word processors, a spreadsheet or
two) and so on, that were crushed by StarOffice (and OpenOffice).
Crushed in the same way BSD or GNU Hurd are crushed by the Linux kernel?
I'm having trouble subscribing to that kind of POV. FOSS projects don't
compete in the same way proprietary products do. A piece of open and
free code lives as long as there is someone to maintain it. I, for one,
use quite a lot of code long abandoned by it's authors.
--
MV
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