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Sun wants people to pay for StarOffice

Posted Sep 21, 2004 19:42 UTC (Tue) by dmaxwell (guest, #14010)
In reply to: Sun wants people to pay for StarOffice by JoeBuck
Parent article: OpenOffice: A legal Trojan horse--but for whom? (ZDNet)

Perhaps it is time for a fork. Hosted by OSDL perhaps. You have to assign copyrights to have contributions accepted into Openoffice which Sun can then use in Staroffice if they so desire. Since Sun is selling Openoffice down the river to MS, I don't think they need community copyright assignments anymore.

Incidentally since it is Sun that released under the GPL, it is Sun that has asserted they had the legal right to release everything in it. I don't think their little agreement with MS is going to save them if a defendant ever decides Sun could use some of the fun too.

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Posted Sep 21, 2004 22:46 UTC (Tue) by lakeland (subscriber, #1157) [Link]

I don't think a fork is such a smart idea. For a start there are very few developers outside sun working on OO.o, so I would expect any such fork to struggle. However, I seem to recall reading (here?) about a project to convert OO to a more standard build system in the hopes of attacting external developers.

Personally I think OO.o is an ugly piece of software and best got rid of, but until KOffice is ready to take the stress it is extremely useful to have around. So my personal preference would be for it to struggle along for a couple more years before dying. However, I think that I'm in the minority on this view :-)

Sun wants people to pay for StarOffice

Posted Sep 22, 2004 0:12 UTC (Wed) by eyal (subscriber, #949) [Link]

And what makes you think that KOffice will be exempt from M$ patent lawyers?

M$ has been filing thousands of patents on just about everything. Most of them are probably invalid, but neither OpenOffice.org nor the KDE project have the money to prove it in a court.

Eyal.