Obvious Diversion

The news has hit the fan that Sun Microsystems, in its $2 Billion US settlement with Microsoft, has protected its for-pay StarOffice from patent-based lawsuits lodged by Microsoft, but has thrown OpenOffice to the wolves. First discovered by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the agreement concludes that both companies will not sue each other for any patent disputes now and for the next ten years, but it wasn’t extended to Sun’s OpenOffice. Drawing an even clearer picture, Sun has agreed to help Microsoft in any patent disputes against OpenOffice and it’s users. In short, Sun has paved the way for Microsoft to lawyer the OpenOffice project to death both as an organization and in the marketplace.

What is OpenOffice?

For those unfamiliar with OpenOffice, it’s an open source alternative to Microsoft Office that has replacements for Word, Excel and other applications. I recommend it to friends and family often as it’s very capable and, more importantly, inexpensive. In a tight economy, the savings of avoiding a purchase of Microsoft Office on top of the base cost of buying a computer is substantial.

Open Source In Name Only

Place this news alongside Sun’s other announcements with open source, and it leaves the impression that Sun’s use of open source is in name only. Sun has announced that it will open source its Solaris Unix variant, but will more than likely do so under a very strict license. Sun has always pushed the notion that at some point it will open source Java or at least parts of Java, but doesn’t seem eager to supply anyone with details or a timeline. With Sun’s abandonment of OpenOffice, it should be clear now that Sun’s interest in open source is clearly nothing more than a PR play by using the phrase “open source” as window dressing to try to attract developers who find some affection in the term.

The truth here is that if OpenOffice does meet its demise, it will not do so because of any failure to make a good, competitive product.