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What does Sun's OpenOffice.org support mean for StarOffice?
October 19, 2006

As noted by Simon Phipps, Sun is now offering support and services for the OpenOffice.org productivity suite.

It is an interesting twist given that Sun donated the code behind its StarOffice software to start the OpenOffice.org project in the first place, and seems to make sense. OpenOffice.org users who want the support of a major vendor can now get it, and Sun gets a new revenue stream.

However, it does raise some questions about the long-term future of StarOffice.

The company is offering both standard and premium services, as you can see here and supports OpenOffice.org on the Sparc and Intel versions of its Solaris, as well as Linux and Windows.

Standard support means "12 hours a day, five days a week" with a four-hour response time, software releases and updates, administration resources and notification services.

Premium support means 24x7with live transfer online and phone support and interoperability assistance, as well as the same software releases and updates, administration resources and notification services.

The exact same service plans are also available for StarOffice and while choice is all important, it does raise the question as to whether the company will continue to differentiate the two offerings in the long-term.

Of course, Sun does provide third party technologies to OpenOffice.org to make StarOffice, such as clipart, fonts, and migration and configuration tools, but these are the sort of things that could be just as easily delivered by an enhanced subscription service as a different package.

Just a thought.

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