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a bunch of words sorted into posts.

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Master of Reality:

quote:Sun are the ones charging, not OpenOffice, nothing wrong with that, but Sun probably "need" our money a little less than perhaps the name of this topic implies!
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quote:You still have the title wrong.
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quote:a bunch of words sorted into posts
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this is why i will never be a headline writer for.. anything.

voidmain:
That is correct. And I believe that's what I said. But OpenOffice.org (GPL) and StarOffice (Sun) come from the same source. StarOffice has some additional features like a database, some proprietary non-free fonts, etc. If you had read all of the articles leading up to Sun putting a price tag on StarOffice, their reasoning was "That's what companies are telling us they want".  Companies do not want to use a free and unsupported productivity apps.  They would rather pay a little and get support and have someone to call if it doesn't work properly.

Sure, you and I know that you can get better support from the "community" and if you don't need a proprietary database we can use OpenOffice with just as good of results.  Sun believes that they will actually chip away a larger portion of the MS Office market share by selling their product at a low price rather than giving it away for free. I tend to agree with that thought after some thought of my own.

It'll be interesting to sit back and see how it plays out. Sun will be giving out the Solaris version of StarOffice at no charge, unless they have recently changed their minds.

hoojchoons:
I can't see what's wrong with Sun charging for Star Office. It's really their product and they're entitled to charge for it. It's their right. I wouldn't mind paying only for a quarter of what M$ charges for their so called Office suite. I'm still using Star Office 5.2 and I must say that besides being a bit slow, it's a damn good Office suite. And since Sun are friendly enough to give portions of their code to the community, one could also use Open Office as well. It's damn good too. There are really a lot of options   :D

Calum:

quote:Originally posted by hoojchoons:
I can't see what's wrong with Sun charging for Star Office. It's really their product and they're entitled to charge for it. It's their right. I wouldn't mind paying only for a quarter of what M$ charges for their so called Office suite. I'm still using Star Office 5.2 and I must say that besides being a bit slow, it's a damn good Office suite. And since Sun are friendly enough to give portions of their code to the community, one could also use Open Office as well. It's damn good too. There are really a lot of options    :D  
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nobody said they couldn't charge for it! That's not what's at issue here!

how about this for an idea though - they could charge for the stuff that they are charging for now, but still release their source for free (or what source they feel they legally can and so forth), and this way the businesses who want to pay for support can do so, and the open source thing won't affect them, and vice versa, the open source stuff won't be affected by the fact that the program is charged for.

With openoffice.org, this is almost what is already happening, i can't really think of another program that has such a good setup as this, except maybe mozilla, but my suggestion is that they have it all under one roof, that staroffice in its open source form, would not replace openoffice, but just give people who didn't want to cough up for support that extra choice. Plus they can say on their CVs, "i use staroffice" instead of "i use openoffice" which may promote the response "oh yes, what's that then" or worse "isn't that some sort of free hobbyists' program?".

voidmain:
But that's already being done. OpenOffice.org *is* the unproprietary portion of StarOffice.  They give to each other. OpenOffice.org will likely always be Free/free (read the FAQ on www.openoffice.org).  I personally don't see any issue whatsoever. The original poster *thought* there was an issue but had his wires crossed.

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