July 25th, 2008
Open Office sweeps Sourceforge awards
This must have left a mark on Microsoft.
Microsoft was the diamond sponsor for this year’s Sourceforge Community Choice Awards, culminating last night in a party at the Jupiter Hotel in Portland.
The big winner? Open Office. It swept the awards for top project, top enterprise project, and top project in education.
Big Money Matt found this curious, but not me. Open Office has matured a lot in the last year, and it’s a consumer-oriented project. It’s good stuff. Get yours now.
What Firefox was doing a year ago, Open Office was doing this year — getting a chunk of the mass market off the Microsoft train.
There is a problem with this, of course. While Firefox and Open Office are great projects, their motivation is to take money out of the system, to take down the old Microsoft monopoly. They lack compelling business models of their own.
Unlike, say, enterprise open source packages that can justify their support bills. Or SaaS projects that can roll their costs into an online subscription, along with a handsome profit.
So let me offer a modest proposal. For next year, a new award. Best new open source business model.
Let that winner pay for the party.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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