September 21st, 2004
OpenOffice: Did Microsoft and Sun just put open source profiteers on notice?
Last week, ZDNet contributing editor Dave Rosenberg asked if Sun may have sold out OpenOffice.org — one of the open source projects that Sun stewards — when a recently disclosed portion of the company’s sweeping agreement with Microsoft revealed that Sun would not intervene should Microsoft choose to sue OpenOffice licensees for patent infringement. Meanwhile, based on the content of that disclosure, licensees of StarOffice – Sun’s commercially licensed superset of OpenOffice — have nothing to worry about when it comes to Microsoft’s legal eagles. The arrangement has sent shockwaves through the open source community, has given rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories, and sent Sun into a bit of spin control (yet another use for Sun COO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog). But if you ask me, most open source users can relax. Microsoft may not be crazy about losing customers to open source, but it also knows that open source is here to stay. Sun, on the other hand, is actually a champion of open source, even though the disclosure seems to indicate otherwise. So what gives? More than likely, the disclosure — known as the "Stand-Still Agreement" — was a message to OEMs and Linux distributors that, under the guise of open source, are profiting off of what could be Microsoft or Sun’s intellectual property (IP). As I explain in my column, that message is "If you use our IP to make money and take our customers, you can expect a call from our accounts receivable department shortly."
