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List:       opensolaris-discuss
Subject:    Re: [osol-discuss] : - (
From:       Octave Orgeron <unixconsole () yahoo ! com>
Date:       2010-09-30 15:45:00
Message-ID: 886049.81581.qm () web30807 ! mail ! mud ! yahoo ! com
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Hi,

Contrary to popular believe there are still some major differences between 
OpenOffice and the StarOffice code base. StarOffice has closed source bits 
around MS Office translation and printer support that are absent in OpenOffice. 
I've found that StarOffice is better with MS compatibility than OpenOffice. So 
there are still good reasons for buying StarOffice, which is still hands down 
cheaper than MS Office. What I find troublesome with a lot of these open source 
projects is that it takes contributions from commercial companies to keep these 
projects moving and somehow the open source community treats them like dirt. 
That's not to say that commercial companies are great at interacting with open 
source projects, look at how things turned out between Oracle and the 
OpenSolaris community. But at the end of the day, there is not such thing as a 
free lunch and the Stallman cool-aide drinkers will have to grow up one day just 
as much as the commercial companies have to learn to communicate and 
collaborate.

Open source is great for developers and users. But when it comes to quality, you 
need good development processes, funding, and architectural direction. These are 
things most open source communities lack the ability to facilitate. Even Linux 
is at the mercy of fixes and enhancements from commercial companies (Oracle, Red 
Hat, Novell, IBM, HP, etc.) to make it work as expected. OpenOffice will 
continue to be dependent upon Oracle in some shape or form. Just think about 
when the next MS format comes out and makes OpenOffice incompatible. Who is 
going to fix that? MS?  At the same time, commercial companies that release open 
source code are dependent upon open source developers and users for feedback and 
finding bugs in the wild before a commercial release. So it's really a two way 
street.

So really the open source community and the commercial companies need each other 
equally. As for Oracle, they still have a lot to learn from Sun and the open 
source community. Sun was great at developing technology and open sourcing it 
for everyone to re-use. But at the same time, Sun has a lot to learn from Oracle 
about how to turn a profit from all its IP. If Sun had a better business model 
around its software, it would still be around. I think the open source community 
has to keep pushing Oracle in the right direction, but not act so sophomoric 
about it. 


 *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
Octave J. Orgeron
Solaris Virtualization Architect and Consultant
Web: http://unixconsole.blogspot.com
E-Mail: unixconsole@yahoo.com
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----- Original Message ----
From: Calum Benson <calum.benson@oracle.com>
To: W. Wayne Liauh <wp@HawaiiLinux.org>
Cc: opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
Sent: Thu, September 30, 2010 9:45:56 AM
Subject: Re: [osol-discuss] : - (


On 30 Sep 2010, at 02:44, W. Wayne Liauh wrote:
> 
> I don't know if anyone has mentioned this, but the update 9 of Solaris 10 has 
>finally switched to OpenOffice.org.  Thus, it seems that Oracle also silently 
>RIP'd StarOffice (actually the decision was already made during Sun's time).  
>

IIRC, Sun simply decided that it didn't make business sense to give away a 
non-free (as in beer) product, i.e. StarOffice, with a freely-downloadable 
product, i.e. Solaris 10.  StarOffice, now called Oracle Open Office, never went 
away, and is still available to buy:
<http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/open-office/index.html>

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Oracle Corporation Ireland Ltd.
mailto:calum.benson@oracle.com         Solaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Oracle Corp.

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