This is just my opinion, Sun could have survived under different circumstances, but you have very large billion dollar companies to compete. The little guy can only afford to make so many mistakes. Oracle, no matter the negativity, has the resources and clients to sustain a few big blows. A company worth $135 billion dollars is what Sun needed to back its financial resources which were down to $2 billion dollars. Yes, there was some shakeout from the big tree but sometimes it is for the betterment for the people leaving and the smaller businesses gaining new talent and great experience. That can help create new billion dollar corporate PARTNERS to help Oracle/Sun stay alive and radiant in the business world. Hey, everything could be bought up by oil companies! As for StarOffice 8/9, many legacy Solaris and OpenSolaris users have it and OpenOffice 3.2.1/Oracle Officie is great update in its own right. Oracle is doing the 'value add' Offcie extensions so you can always get the legacy StarOffice quality... See: http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/open-office/043539.html http://www.oracle.com/us/products/applications/open-office/oracle-odf-plugin-ds-155370.pdf ~ Ken Mays --- On Thu, 9/30/10, Octave Orgeron wrote: > > 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. > 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 _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org