Subj : Re: GNU Public Licences Revisited (again) To : comp.programming From : Randy Howard Date : Tue Aug 23 2005 10:11 pm Scott Moore wrote (in article ): > > > Joe Butler wrote: >> This from that page: >> >> "Free software is a matter of freedom: people should be free to use software >> in all the ways that are socially useful" >> >> The problem is that a commercial app is not given the freedom to use 'free >> software', even thought it may be of great social value. Unfortunatly, the >> person/team that want to produce this software don't have the time to >> develop an app that is given away for free, and they can't give up their day >> jobs just yet. >> >> How much money have Sun spent doing Open Office - your average >> company/person cannot afford to spend money like that just so they can give >> away the final product. >> > > Openoffice was not given away for free. It was done to help the sales of > our hardware products and to advance recognition of the Sun name in general. I thought that was the point of StarOffice, which, IIRC was commercial, rather than OpenOffice? > Sun said so, and continues to say that with products such as open Solaris. I had the impression that they really did it to ease the pressure calling for Sun to make everything open source. Now of course, it seems to be happening anyway. -- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) .