Open Source Weblog

With Sun offering the exact same services for OpenOffice.org as its StarOffice version I wondered how long it would make sense for Sun to continue to support two different packages.

Sun still provides third party technologies in 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, I noted.

Simon’s official response explained the business rationale behind offering support for OpenOffice.org: “OpenOffice.org has become phenomenally successful, Sun alone has shipped more than 70 million copies of OpenOffice.org 2.0,” he said. “Out there, there are maybe 100 million copies of OpenOffice.org. It would be senseless to ignore that opportunity.”

That certainly makes sense, as does Simon’s personal opinion on how the open source model diminishes the reliance on officially packaged products.

“You’ll expect to see Sun’s offerings around open source expand as you’re seen OpenOffice.org,” he said. “All open source business models revolve around the value the customer gets from the software.”

The implication is that instead of offering officially packaged products, a company can now offer impromptu support offerings for the technologies or usage models that prove the most popular.

Citing the company’s offer of incident-based support for the NetBeans development environment, Phipps added “I think you’ll see growing support from Sun for the things people use.”

Does this mean the end of StarOffice as an individual product? Clearly not, and I’m not trying to put words into Simon’s mouth, but if you follow his train of thought it makes sense for companies to be focusing on value-added support offerings, rather than value-added product packages.

I don’t know how many StarOffice customers Sun has, but I’d be prepared to bet it’s a few less than 100 million.

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