I thought Sun was pretty up-front about this from the start. When I
looked at it I never got the idea they would be giving StarOffice away
forever. I was under the impression that you could download
time-bombed, cripple-ware beta versions for free. You got to use it for a
few months and evaluate it. Sun got the benefit of a bigger set of
testers and some mindshare that might lead to marketshare. It seemed
clear to me that they always had intended to $ell it for real money when
they were ready to ship the final version. Sure, it would be nice if they
gave it away, but I don't think they ever intended or managed to deceive me.
On Sun, 24 Feb 2002, R P Herrold wrote:
> >From Slashdot:
>
> Sun to Charge for Star Office 6.0
>
> Posted by michael on Sunday February 24,
> @05:08PM
> from the death-of-a-thousand-pinpricks dept.
> biwillia writes: "According to this heise article (in German,
> or Google translated), free versions of Star Office will now
> only be available to Solaris users. Free versions for Linux
> and Windows users will no longer be offered. A homemade
> translation of the first paragraph reads, 'With version 6.0 of
> Star Office, scheduled to be released in May, Sun has
> changed the product politics of their Office package, which
> had been freely distributed since the aquisition of
> Hamburg-based Star Division. In the future, Sun wishes to
> charge license fees for usage of the Windows and Linux
> versions. Only the version for Sun's own operation system
> Solaris will remain free.'"
>
> ----------------------------------------------------
>
> The moral of the story: If you don't have the source under a
> license permitting forking, you don't have a thing.
>
> doo-wap doo-wap, doo-wap doo-wahhh
>
> -- Russ Herrold
>
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