ZDNet: Evan Leibovitch: Can a Sun change its spots?

“Last week I downloaded StarOffice for Linux for the first
time. It’s something I’d never thought I’d do, but a number of
circumstances have both forced my hand and made the move much
easier.“

“First off, finding a decent word processor for Linux has been
more of a headache that I’d have wanted. Corel WordPerfect randomly
crashed when I tried to edit Microsoft Word documents. Applixware
Words didn’t crash, but it refused to read the files at all — and
its import and other functionalities leave much to be desired. In
fact, Applixware in general was roundly thrashed at the last
meeting of my local user group. (A shame, too, because as far as I
know, it was the first shot at a proprietary commercial application
that uses the copylefted GTK library.)….”

“Then there was always StarOffice, the suite that Sun bought a
few quarters ago and made freely downloadable (if not open source).
It looked good enough, but I was wary of Sun’s intentions. When it
was first introduced, the licensing and distribution schemes for
the free StarOffice were so convoluted that they simply cried out
for conspiracy theories.”

“My own pet belief was that Sun was turning StarOffice into the
front of a bait-and-switch routine, leading users into an ASP hell
ruled by Sun’s own server line. It was a reasonable scenario, but
this theory came to a crashing end last week when Sun announced it
would open source StarOffice. Indeed, Sun isn’t just open sourcing
it, but is putting the whole project under the genuine GNU Public
License (GPL) — as well as a home grown Sun alternative created
for those who hate the GPL.”

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