Sun's StarOffice Release: Is It Really What You Think?

[phred at teleport.com]

I also posed a question about Sun's SCSL in the Slashdot topic collecting
input for this week's interview with Tim O'Reilly.  Bill Joy spent a good
deal of time at his Open Source convention keynote speech talking about
the SCSL and Sun's approach to opening most or all of its source,
particularly for Jini.  This has implications well beyond the impact of
StarOffice.  Bill Joy seems to believe that a return to the quasi-openness
of Unix circa 1979 would be optimal.  After all, that's why he and the CSRG
got to fork the code and create the BSD we all know so well.  And no doubt,
many great things came from that process.  Surely that is a major reason
that Sun is emphasizing the providing of source for free to "research"
organizations.  Yet this approach kind of misses the whole point about
free software and/or open source.  

I have to admit, I would be somewhat less concerned about the localized
implications of this if I thought it was Sun's Bill Joy who wants to rule
the world, rather than Sun's Scott McNealy.  But even aside from that,
the tentative lines being drawn by large corporate presences such as Sun
are likely to solidify into the fault lines of the future.  Opening the
source is a very good thing indeed, but the devil as always is in the
fine print, not the headers.

phred