Sun missing opportunity (Score 1)

Looks like to me Sun is keeping their eye firmly fixed on the tree, and
thereby missing the forest. They appear to be struggling to retain the direct
money making potential of star office, at the expense of an opportunity to
get into a market from which they are effectively blocked.

In releasing this under a license which prevents even indirect commercial
usage, they are guaranteeing that 98% of the computer-using populace will
never see it. They will have complete control & money making opportunites
on a piece of software used by less than 1% of the populace. Software
available for free download is of great use to me, and of none
whatsoever to my mother. Unfortunately for Sun, the intersection of the
people for whom a free download is meaningful and those heavily concerned
about the office suite, is very nearly the empty set.

Releasing under GPL would be much more effective. Most importantly, it would
allow vendors to bundle it in with their low cost alternatives. For instance,
a company like e-machines could shave off a significant portion of the total
cost of their systems by shipping a free gnu/linux OS with a free Star Office
suite. My mother is never going to ftp the file from sunsite, but if it comes
preinstalled on her machine, is easy to use, and interoperates with
her boss and friends, she will make the switch without even realizing it.

So what's in it for sun is the interoperability thing. Right now, they cannot
even get their foot in the door. I myself maintain a Windows partition on
my laptop specifically for power point, even though I own ApplixWare for
Linux and find it completely adequate for the same task. The reason is that
my boss often wants my slides, and importing and exporting to MS Office works
in theory, but not in practice (the color is messed up, embedded charts are
lost, etc).

You can be sure MS will keep it that way too. Right now, MS Office is the
defacto "standard" of office suites, simply because that's what the public
at large uses. With KDE, Gnome and the greatly improved Linux install,
Windows will soon lose the main argument of their OS over the technically
superior Unix: my mother can install and run it, even if her VCR is still
blinking 12:00 12:00 12:00

The best way of defeating an opponent is to prevent him from taking the field.
This is what MS gets to do when they control the office productivity
environment so completely. Other office suites must survive on the
perimeter, spending desperate hours trying to achieve some sort of MS
compatibility so that they can sell themselves as "MS office compatible" so
I will buy their product in the hopes of being able to interoperate with
management. MS can change the undocumented internals of the storage format
anytime they feel like a competing office suite is interoperating too well.

So, if Sun released the software under a license that supported bundling by
third party vendors, they would start themselves on the road to having an
office suite that could gain enough of a following to break the MS stranglehold
on the office format. The win for sun is not that someone is using their
office suite, but that their hardware could again be a viable option for
someone wanting to interoperate with the rest of the world. To get this kind
of market saturation, though, you need to start somewhere where the quick
answer of "keep buying MS Office" is not easily supported. Low-end
machines selling for rock-bottom prices are clearly such a market, and one
can credibly believe that this market could eventually reach enough
end-users to challenge the MS Office hegemony.

Once Sun is a viable hardware/software alternative again, they can push their
thin client ideas for large businesses much more effectively. So, the direct
money they would make from selling the product would be $0.00, but they might
just prevent themselves from waking up one day to realize they have too few
customers left to support their business, because everyone bought wintel due
to compatibility issues.

All of this argues that Sun needs to rethink their financial policy in regards
to this license, but it is my contention that this is not enough. What they
(and everyone besides Wintel) should want is that this thing is released under
GPL. With GPL, Sun could expect development help from such disparate
companies/orgs as IBM (so their PowerPC could make a viable laptop), Compaq
(ditto for alpha procs), Red Hat (strong selling point for Linux),
Dell (low-cost machine for my mother), Gnu foundation, KDE, and the rest
of the hacker community.

Now, none of these communities is interested in working on a piece of software,
only to have Sun tell them they can't sell it, must pay for selling it or
can't release it freely. However, if they GPL the software, everyone knows
they can get back the investment they put into the software, so all interested
parties would be free to help in development. This in turn allows Sun to
spend less money directly developing Star Office, and thus saves them the one
drawback to this approach: not making money on something you pay to have
developed. With such a wide variety of companies with vested interest in
seeing the project succeed, you have perhaps the only available defense
against the deep pockets of MS.

The key to success in this approach is to make the tools as easy to use as
possible (this implies it is at least as good a product as MS Office; I'm no
fan of MS, but I'll tell you MS Office is a very good product nonetheless), and
to get enough market share that MS doesn't win just because I need it to share
my stuff with other people. This market share will need to come from many
different places, low-end market, people using alternative OS's, alternative
machines, etc. With a completely free, GPL'd office document with an open
standard file format (XML) in place, the issue of compatibility is effectively
eliminated, giving Sun, SGI, Compaq/DEC, etc., their chance to rise or fall in
a free market.

I see the release of a GPL'd Star Office as a possible inflection point in
the history personal computing, with cross-platform viability being available
for the first time to the personal and small business user. The release of
the code under the Sun license is instead an opportunity much more like
Mozilla: some moderate media exposure (roughly equivalent to paying for some
commercial air time), and perhaps an opportunity to receive more detailed bug
reports. But as for great development assistance from the community at large,
or an entry into the market Sun is starving on the sidelines of, this license
is inadequate to the task.