With friendly insistence, Sun claims that Java and StarOffice are different products for different audiences and, therefore, require different licensing models. In a totally unpredictable and inconsistent - but delightful in its outcome - way, Sun has come to an Open Source GPL licensing decision for StarOffice.

On July 19 Sun announced that StarOffice was going under the GPL license for all versions, with a new 6.0 version, probably in October. Sun is doing this full-throttle, with funds to set up a site managed by Collab.Net at www.openoffice.org. Here, interested parties can get full information on the GPL licensing process, join in a burgeoning discussion group that, at the moment, mainly consists of enthusiastic volunteers signing up, and eventually download open source code.

Sun isn't leaving it at that. All of the StarOffice developers (more than 200) will participate in offering code to the GPL process. New releases of StarOffice will be determined by the Open Source process. Module leaders and an advisory board will be in charge, not Sun (although they are likely to predominate in early efforts, based on their numbers and product expertise).

Sun hopes this means that developers in the Open Source movement will

·Participate in defining, providing features for, and debugging, StarOffice.
·Creating versions of StarOffice for operating systems Sun doesn't intend to provide, e.g., BeOS, or no longer wants to support, e.g., OS/2.

(Incidentally, there is a lively discussion on OS/2 on the OpenOffice.Org site, with some OS/2 stalwarts demanding access to the existing code (development stopped at 5.1) and Sun explaining why, although it plans to support and debug that version for five more years, it won't release it to open source, but instead will offer OS/2ers' the chance to port Release 6 to OS/2.

·Use StarOffice, on its various operating systems, as a platform for development of vertical and other applications, much like developers today use Microsoft Office. This is particularly appealing to Sun, with its strong competitive flavor, as the two firms are fierce rivals.

Sun is assuming that offering StarOffice as Open Source on all its supported platforms (Windows, NT, Unix, Linux, Macintosh-soon) will encourage developers, especially Open Source developers in the web world, Sun's special territory, to prefer StarOffice.

What, you might ask, is that all about? Isn't StarOffice a 13-year-old word processor and office suite, based in OS/2. To understand the GPL decision, it's important to note that StarOffice's current emphasis is very different than its beginnings.

It's true that StarOffice, purchased by Sun in September, 1999, started out as a German word processor for the OS/2 market. But it has long been a cross-platform product and Sun was much more interested in its server-based version, StarPortal, wending its was to a fall announcement and a market debut early next year, than in StarOffice itself. To Sun, StarOffice is (pick one or more) (1) a competitive swipe Microsoft, particularly since it's distributed for free; (2) the desktop version of StarPortal, permitting future StarPortal users to get started now and work off-line later; and (3) an important way of controlling a development environment.

Sun's Scott McNealy has long claimed that software is only interesting to Sun as a way to sell more Sun servers and that StarPortal is intended to be given to Sun SP (service provider) partners, who will buy lots of Sun servers to provide StarPortal to their customers as a Microsoft office-interoperable, next generation office product. We're dying to see it in that light, but so far actually viewing of what will ultimately reach the market hasn't been easy. Sun has limited demos to some early versions of canned software and to NDA's for early customers. Another early customer access, for a second version of the software, is about to get underway, according to StarOffice founder Marco Borreis.

First looks at the product (untuned and early) showed it to be short on function and slow, but we'd guess that by now it's had lots of time to be refined and tuned. We're hoping to get a peek soon; you may recall our patience for relying on vendor assurances for unshipped software is very thin. In a few months, StarPortal is likely to be available for public opinions and then we'll be able to compare it with both conventional client/server products as well as with new web-based Net Generation products.

In the meantime, you may join us in speculating about:

·How important is desktop software, anyway, as we all move toward server-based software on the web? When we asked Corel whether they'd GPL the WordPerfect suite, they politely pointed out that (1) they could and (2) unlike Sun, they actually made substantial revenue from their application software. More to the point, they currently offer the Linux version of their WordPerfect word processor and the other platform versions of many non word processing components of their office suites as free downloads. Corel is known to be working on a server-based version of their software.

·Microsoft, of course, has already announced the Microsoft.net server-based software version of their office suite. When, exactly, they'll get from desktop and hosted client/server software to server-based software for the web is still a subject of speculation. Microsoft's not talking, but competitors think two years is a good guess.

What do we think? That web-based software is the future. That building it for the web counts. We'll be telling you more soon.

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