James Knott wrote:
June K. Carrasco wrote:
Salutations!
I am very interested in Open Office. The software sounds terrific.
I am
amazed that such wonderful do-all software can just be given away!
How can
this be? I searched your FAQ's for answered and my question was not
addressed to my satisfaction. How is it that you can just give away
this
great piece of software? I know that there is a great cost in
research and
development of software, so how is it that you can just give it
away? What
is behind all of this? Who's paying for it? What is the philosophy
driving
this benevolence?
OpenOffice is what is called "open source" software. This means the
source code is freely available. With OpenOffice, much of the work
comes from Sun and their work on StarOffice. Other work is done by
volunteers in the community. In Sun's case, they expect to make their
money on support for StarOffice and OpenOffice as well as from selling
StarOffice.
You may wish to read this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_software
There is also a great deal of satisfaction in providing a clean, honest,
open source product as an alternative to a very closed source,
dishonest, evil empire, greedy, expensive, non-working product and
company that has no respect for law or persons. It is amazing however,
the amount of people that prefer to purchase a lock-in where they must
agree to a contract that states that a huge company owns the software
and documents that you create and that usage permission can be withdrawn
at any time without cause.
Floyd
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
