Oracle’s ODF Plug-in Pricing: What’s up with That?

“When news of Oracle’s intended acquisition of Sun Microsystems
broke long ago, many people wondered what that would mean for
OpenOffice, the most widely adopted full desktop implementation of
ODF. But Oracle immediately imposed a company-wide “no comment”
policy on that topic, so everyone has been wondering what the
answer might be ever since.

“So like many others, I expect, I’m trying to get my brain
around Oracle’s reasoning in deciding to charge $90 for a formerly
free ODF conversion plug-in developed by Sun Microsystems. That
downloadable plug-in was intended for Microsoft Office users who
wanted to import ODF-compliant documents created, most obviously,
by users of the free, open source OpenOffice.org (OOo) version, or
of Sun’s StarOffice, the for-sale, supported productivity suite
based on the free OOo code.

“Moreover, it’s not just $90 you’ll need to fork over –
the plug-in is only available in packages of 100.”

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