[wellylug] Re: OO.org

Rob Giltrap - Ubiety Group rob at ubietygroup.com
Tue Jul 16 21:22:01 NZST 2002


Phil Daintree wrote:

>
> I can't remember exactly where I read this, but it was a report that there
> had been very limited contributions from non-Sun ie the "open source
> community", almost all of the code has been cut by Sun employees but 
> testing
> and debugging has been the contribution provided from making the project
> open source.

It is correct that the majority of the coding has been done by Sun 
employees (mostly from the old Star Division in Hamburg, Germany). This 
is due to the fact that these guys wrote the original StarOffice. All 
the code has been put under LGPL and SISSL so it is now a community 
resource. Sun has had to help build the OO community from scratch and 
many projects are now running independent of Sun.

>
>
> IMHO it is Sun's strategy to market it and proliferate it taking as 
> much MS
> revenue as possible. I'm not sure if the motives are strictly honourable -
> hey who cares!
>
> Phil

Now that Sun has delivered to the open source community it's published 
strategy is to make StarOffice and the contribution it makes to 
OpenOffice self-funding (it is currently a loss leader product for 
them). Their objectives are to commodotise the office space with 
OpenOffice,  the desktop space with Gnome, the browser space with 
Mozilla so that people once again have choice in their desktop and 
desktop productivity tools.

Once this happens it will remove the barriers to people using alternate 
hardware platforms like Sun's SunRay devices 
http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/sunray1/
NB: Having used and project managed the installation of 1500 of them I 
must say are far superior to using PCs.

Their motives are honourable. They embrace open source as a method for 
competing in the market place against a convicted monopolist with the 
intention of making a buck for their shareholders as they are supposed 
to do. If they happen to kick the crap out of MS along the way then 
thats just a nice bonus ;-)

Rob.


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