Jan-Oliver Wagner writes:
no, you are not going mad :-) StarOffice is _no_ Free Software.
Yesterday I had a talk on Free Software and GIS at University of Munster and exactly the same statement came up from the audience. It is really interesting how it evolved that so many people think of StarOffice as Free Software.
I experience the same problems :-( Sun deliberatly marketed it to achieve this result. Since OpenOffice is Free Software people say StarOffice and OpenOffice interchangeably and they even *use* StarOffice because OpenOffice is Free Software. To me it's like using Oracle because MySQL is Free Software. There is hardly any rationale in this behaviour but it's there anyway. I guess the only thing we can do is to constantly remind people that OpenOffice is Free Software, not StarOffice. That reminds me of people not willing to see the difference between the Open Source movement and the Free Software movement.
Cheers,
On Wed, 2002-04-24 at 18:14, Loic Dachary wrote:
I experience the same problems :-( Sun deliberatly marketed it to achieve this result. Since OpenOffice is Free Software people say StarOffice and OpenOffice interchangeably and they even *use* StarOffice because OpenOffice is Free Software.
What shows that StarOffice is marketed more is that we don't even have the right name for the Free alternative - the name of the software is now "OpenOffice.org" (I believe the correct short name is "OOo" :).
On the brighter side, I got pulled up for this (saying OpenOffice instead of OpenOffice.org) in something I wrote recently by a "volunteer marketer" for OpenOffice.org - so, this is obviously a problem that they recognise, and there are people reading things and making sure that people make the correct distinction between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. Perhaps we can prod them a little so that they also make the distinction between the types of licence as well as the name - although, they may well do that already, I don't know.
Cheers,
Alex.
On Wed, Apr 24, 2002 at 06:47:59PM +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
On the brighter side, I got pulled up for this (saying OpenOffice instead of OpenOffice.org) in something I wrote recently by a "volunteer marketer" for OpenOffice.org - so, this is obviously a problem that they recognise, and there are people reading things and making sure that people make the correct distinction between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. Perhaps we can prod them a little so that they also make the distinction between the types of licence as well as the name - although, they may well do that already, I don't know.
They should just make StarOffice free and you wouldn't have those problems.
Jeroen Dekkers
On 24 Apr 2002, at 19:54, Jeroen Dekkers wrote:
On Wed, Apr 24, 2002 at 06:47:59PM +0100, Alex Hudson wrote:
On the brighter side, I got pulled up for this (saying OpenOffice instead of OpenOffice.org) in something I wrote recently by a "volunteer marketer" for OpenOffice.org - so, this is obviously a problem that they recognise, and there are people reading things and making sure that people make the correct distinction between StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. Perhaps we can prod them a little so that they also make the distinction between the types of licence as well as the name - although, they may well do that already, I don't know.
They should just make StarOffice free and you wouldn't have those problems.
SUN has just kindly agreed to go in the other direction. StarOffice has now to be paid for (as Version 6). Maybe that gets people noticing - maybe.
Cheers J.
On Thu, 2002-04-25 at 12:11, joack@gmx.net wrote:
They should just make StarOffice free and you wouldn't have those problems.
SUN has just kindly agreed to go in the other direction. StarOffice has now to be paid for (as Version 6). Maybe that gets people noticing - maybe.
On other happy news, GUADEC 3 helped spun new life into the GNOME Office project, partly because of the dire news of OO and SO.
Hugs, rms