Marketing OpenOffice.org

Marketing OpenOffice.org

The fact that the raising of funds is not mentioned is no oversight, but probably a calculated omission. The whole issue of an independent "OpenOffice.org Foundation" or other body that can raise funds, and/or hold independent ownership of the code, has been promised by Sun since the inception of the project. However, everytime when pushed, Sun backs off, and about a year ago mooted the concept in its entirety.

Bruce Perens is correct in treating Sun's motivations around OpenOffice.org with significant suspicion - many of the recent questions around the details of the MS agreement have been brushed aside, laughed away, or simply ridiculed, but none have been answered in a fair and straightforward manner.

It is obvious that this is a marketing ploy for StarOffice - sow fear of potential litigation issues in the hearts of corporate decision makers, so they will procure the "protected" StarOffice as opposed to the "exposed" OpenOffice.org product. While healthy sales of StarOffice are good for OpenOffice.org to an extent - it proves to Sun that the model works, and they will likely continue investing in OpenOffice.org - the flipside is that Sun will see StarOffice as the cashcow MSOffice is to Microsoft, and act accordingly.

Sun is far from clean, and are no angels in this matter. I used to be a core volunteer contributor to OpenOffice.org for a good 2 years. I have acted as a project lead for the website and some other projects, am one of the founders of the marketing project, have been a driving force in the (then) new copyright assignment and licensing model, and am one of the authors of the Community Council - that was until I decided to pack in and leave the OpenOffice.org project to itself until Sun's involvement is dramatically decreased, or a viable fork comes around, due to having been at the sharp end of Sun's retaliatory corporate stick for not falling in line.

Anybody who works closely with Sun for a significant period on opensource projects will know that Sun sees opensource development as a source of free labour, nothing more. Sun has no love for "the community" other then when or where the community can be of use to it. Sun has the OpenOffice.org community right where it wants it, and has no interest in the community " to become completely self-sufficient, and rely on volunteer effort and/or funds generated by the Community." Sun does not *want* a significant influx of outside developers to assist in the project - it would lose control, and that is their biggest nightmare. Sun, through Danise Cooper, claims that the "Independent Foundation Model" does not work, conveniantly ignoring plenty of evidence to the contrary, and will fight tooth and nail any effort to make them deliver on their original promise to truly free OpenOffice.org.

Having said all that (or rather, having finished my rant), OpenOffice.org is a key product, and is critical to the success of Linux on the desktop. In that light, I have, and will continue to advise my clients to deploy OpenOffice.org, and will assist them in doing so, as opposed to deploying StarOffice. At the end of the day, StarOffice is a proprietary, closed source program, with all the pitfalls associated with that, and as such poses specific business risks to deploying organisations.

I am currently finalising a Desktop Linux deployment based around OpenOffice. While the customer is relatively small (only 1000 seats), it is a significant customer - as in, a well known name - and we are working on a case study around the deployment. The interesting part here is that we migrated the customer away from StarOffice, and onto OpenOffice.org, for a variety of reasons, but chiefly due to the fact that StarOffice is a proprietary product. Sun's fear of losing marketshare to OpenOffice.org is real, and is rightly reflected in the marketing document, as StarOffice has no discernable value-add, over and above OpenOffice.org. Of course, there now is the "feature" that paying for the privilege of using StarOffice will indemnify you of any potential legal hassles with Microsoft....