Re: [Fsfe-uk] Bristol City Council goes open source

[Ian Lynch]

On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 18:10, Alex Hudson wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-10-18 at 18:05 +0100, Tom Chance wrote:
> > It'd be interesting to know why they've opted for Star Office over Open 
> > Office. Support from Sun?
> 
> Probably less "why they opted" more "why they were offered". If it's a
> common procurement, it would have been an open tender process. That
> means that people would have proposed a solution, and they would have
> picked one. I don't know of anyone offering OpenOffice.org (on that
> scale) in this country.

Sun will in fact support OpenOffice.org if pushed! But if their sales
people from the StarOffice division are the ones making front line
contact they can use several arguments for SO. First its protected by
Sun against future litigation eg by a MS patent. MS agreed with Sun not
to "go for SO" but specifically excluded OOo. This is not as sinsiter as
some Flossers have made out. Its a consequence of wider leagal
considerations in a settlement where Sun got loadsa dosh of MS. So they
could argue its lower risk. There are some proprietary bits like WP
filters in SO that the Council might value,

> The differences between the two pieces of software are supposed to be
> minimal these days; maybe it does come with some extra trinkets. I would
> guess that's not the reason they opted for it though (although, ISTR
> StarOffice has better database stuff built-in?)

Any serious user of databases wouldn't use Adabas, theyd connect to a
SQL database using the mechanism built into OOo and SO for doing so. Its
more likely that SO from Sun with support is not much different in price
from OOo from Sun with support. In any case, if some SO sales ensures
Sun engineers keep developing OOo I'd rather Sun got the sales. I
wouldn't want the goose that's laying the golden eggs to die.

There was talk about Sun GPLing OpenOffice and dropping SO as a separate
product. Partly because Sun are a bit miffed at the likes of IBM and the
Chinese using the code and putting nothing back. The equation is whether
the revenue from SO licenses outweigh the value that would come back by
forcing people using the code base to contribute back or desist. This
could happen though probably a few years hence once Sun decides how to
make money out of FLOSS products. 

-- 
Ian Lynch <address@hidden>
ZMS Ltd