> I work with a software house and wish
> that we would start looking harder at Open Source but when I see the type of
> whining and crying as seen with regards to Sun and SO because Sun did not
> give away the crown jewels I loose a bit of respect for some of you,
If your company decides what to do and does it, there won't be any
Sun-type problems. The Sun problem is waffling and internal strife. One
exec (Scot McNealy) promises to "open" Java and says Sun will make their
money selling tools for it, as they are now successfully doing with
Netbeans. Then another Sun exec (usually Scot McNealy again) says Sun
won't open source Java until (excuse) and another Scot says Java will
never be an open standard, then Scot #1 comes back and makes the "going
to open Java" promise again.
Sun has only been a little bit better with SO. They have hinted and
teased. A basic statement, going into the SO 6.0 beta program, that
said, "OpenOffice is now free and GPL licensed, but SO 6.0 will have
extra features including ___ and ___ and the final 6.0 release will sell
for between $ ___ and $ ___ per seat, and the extra features, plus
support, make it well worth the money," would have taken care of everything.
Now Sun is going the Linux distro route, and IMO that's a mistake. If
Corel had simple stuck to making WordPerfect & their graphics software,
and WINE ports of them for Linux, and had sold them, unabashedly, as
commercial software, they would have been fine. Those who don't like
commercial software wouldn't have bought their products, and those who
wanted high-quality, cross-platform software would have. But there was
all that nonsense about the distro, and was the installer GPL or not,
and so on, plus compatibility problems with RPM-based distros for WP
because Corel wanted to lock users in to theirs.
I think the trick is to be honest and consistent. Some people will like
you, some won't. So it goes. But everyone will *respect* you, and in
business, that's what counts.
- Robin
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