> Good intentions worked with Qt, for TrollTech reciprocated;
> Sun can talk the talk all it wants, but it won't walk the
> walk. The Open Source community needs to walk away from them
> -- to continue to think they are good guys for they are going
> to package a Gnome X-top on Solaris is naive.
I may not have much love for Sun, but they did the right thing with
OpenOffice licensing, and never claimed that StarOffice was anything
other than a proprietary product.
So people who don't need proprietary database compatibility, huge
template and graphics libraries, WordPerfect file conversions and
whatever other copyright-dependant features (I don't remember the whole
list) that will be in StarOffice but not in OpenOffice will buy the
commercial product, and them that don't need this stuff will use,
modify, and improve OpenOffice.
I like this pattern. My stepdaughter Alicia, who is frantically trying
to get off welfare forever and is teaching herself to use computers
(quite well, I might add) at home, with a Linux box I made for her and
gave her no real instructions about aside from, "push all the keys and
see what happens," can use OO for training. Then she can go look for a
clerical job at one of the many software houses around the Balto/Wash
area, where even a tiny bit of Linux knowledge will make her stand out
from the ranks of single mom semi-skilled office workers floating
around, all trying to get something better than a "no bennies" $6/hour
warehouse job.
And the software house and otehr commercial users will pay $49 or $99
(the two most rumored price points) for StarOffice commercial, and
Alicia will take exactly no training to use it on her first day at work.
She really won't need training in any other user-level software either,
because she has learned to push keys and see what happens instead of
being scared of computers.
It's all good.
- Robin
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