At its best New Wave/punk represents a fundamental and age-old Utopian dream: that if you give people the license to be as outrageous as they want in absolutely any fashion they can dream up, they'll be creative about it, and do something good besides. -- Lester Bangs
Sun Microsystems has purchased black horse software maker Star Division and is giving StarOffice away for free with the source.
StarOffice has long been the fave office suite of OS/2 users for the same reason
OS/2 users pick all their favorite software: It runs on their system. It's
garnered some sporadic support around Linux folks for pretty much the same
reason.
Well, it belongs to Sun now, and Sun has turned it loose for free with the
source code under Sun's "Sun Community Source Licensing program" license.
You know Stallman will find a way to grouse that it's not really free. In fact,
Sun has placed some limitations on what you can do with the software...
they want you to pay them if you sell it. Whatever. For shmoes like you and
me—or at least like me—who have no real principles attached to the
whole open-source thing, it means we get stuff to use.
Hey, I mean, I got a spreadsheet, and I didn't have to pay Microsoft. That's
pretty cool, huh?
