“IT managers last week welcomed Sun’s decision to release the
source code to its StarOffice suite of desktop applications, but
many still see obstacles to its widespread adoption in the
enterprise.”
“Sun released the source code to the alpha code of StarOffice 6
under the same GNU public licence that the Linux community uses.
The company has not said when the final code will ship, but when it
does it will be available free on the Windows, Linux, Solaris and
MacOS platforms. Microsoft Office, which commands the bulk of
office suite sales, runs only on Windows and MacOS.”
“Mike Doyle, IT manager at charity Cooperation Ireland,
where Office 97 is deployed, said managing user expectations could
be a problem with an open source office suite. “If people know we
have the source code they may expect us to fix a bug, but we are
not staffed up to do this sort of work. Managing user expectation,
which is already difficult enough, will become even more
difficult.